Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON (AP) — Bowing to an outcry over privacy, the Obama administration reversed itself Friday, scaling back the release of consumers’ personal information from the government’s health insurance website to private companies with a commercial interest in the data.

The administration made the changes to HealthCare.gov after The Associated Press reported earlier in the week that the website was quietly sending consumers’ personal data to private companies that specialize in advertising and analyzing Internet data for performance and marketing. The personal details included age, income, ZIP code, tobacco use, and whether a woman is pregnant.

That prompted lawmakers to demand an explanation, while privacy advocates called on the administration to make changes.

Analysis of the website Friday by AP showed that the administration had made changes to reduce the outbound flow of personal information. Before that, the website was explicitly sending personal data to third-party sites.

The site is used by millions to sign up for coverage under the health care law, or to merely browse for insurance plans in their communities.

The changes were confirmed by Cooper Quintin, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. Quintin called it “a great first step,” but said the administration needs to do more.

An administration spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Officials of the Health and Human Services Department had at first defended their information-sharing practices, saying the outside companies only used the data to analyze the workings of HealthCare.gov and make improvements to the website that benefit consumers. There is no evidence that consumers’ personal information was misused, they said.

Created under President Barack Obama’s health care law, HealthCare.gov is the online gateway to government-subsidized private insurance for people who lack coverage on the job. It serves 37 states, while the remaining states operate their own insurance markets. The privacy issue surfaced just as the president was calling for stronger Internet safeguards for consumers.

Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, called it “extremely concerning” for consumers.

Third-party outfits that track website performance are a standard part of e-commerce. It’s a lucrative business, helping Google, Facebook and others tailor ads to customers’ interests. Because your computer and mobile devices can be assigned an individual signature, profiles of Internet users can be pieced together, generating lists that have commercial value.

Third-party sites embedded on HealthCare.gov can’t see your name, birth date or Social Security number. But they may be able to correlate the fact that your computer accessed the government website with your other Internet activities.

Have you been researching a chronic illness like coronary artery blockage? Do you shop online for smoking-cessation aids? Are you investigating genetic markers for a certain type of breast cancer? Are you seeking help for financial problems, or for an addiction?

Google told the AP this week it doesn’t allow its systems to target ads based on medical information.

HealthCare.gov’s privacy policy says in boldface type that no “personally identifiable information” is collected by these Web measurement tools. That is a term defined in government regulations, but other personal details were being allowed through.

Privacy advocates say the administration still needs to do more. The mere presence of connections to private companies on the website —even if they don’t explicitly receive personal data— should be examined because of their ability to reveal sensitive information about a user.

Quintin, the tech expert with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the health site should disable third-party tracking services for people who chose to opt out by installing add-on software on their web browsers.

“HealthCare.gov should meet good privacy standards for all its users,” he said.

The administration is aiming to have more than 9 million people signed up by Feb. 15, the last day of open enrollment. Many consumers wait until the last minute to sign up.

HealthCare.gov was crippled by serious technical problems when it made its debut in the fall of 2013. This year the website has worked much better, a marked contrast. But the privacy issues were a reminder that the site remains a work in progress, like the underlying law.

Difficulty focusing, for many of us, is a daily reality of modern life. How many times do you open your email and get sidetracked from a more important task at work, or find yourself starting to zone out while a friend is telling you a story about his day? Probably pretty often.

Scientists are starting to learn more about how the brain allocates its attentional resources — and how our attention gets away from us. New research from neuroscientists at McGill University has identified, for the first time, a network of neurons critical to our ability to control attention.

A complex of neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, an area involved in many aspects of executive behavioral control, including selective attention, strategic behavioral planning, short-term information retention and action selection. These neurons interact with one another to filter visual information while also ignoring distractions.

While previous research has identified individual neurons that carry attentional signals, there was not yet a sense of a larger neural “attentional map,” lead researcher Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo explained to The Huffington Post.

“What was unclear [previously] is whether the are contains a map of activity that can signal where attention is allocated, within the short time we use to orient attention (few hundred millisecond),” Martinez-Trujillo said in an email to the Huffington Post. “The contribution of this study is that we obtained a realistic estimate of the attentional map, which is composed of, not only one neuron but of many neurons that interact with one another.”

The researchers recorded the brain activity of macaque monkeys as they shifted their gaze to look at objects displayed on a computer screen, which also ignoring visual distractions. Then, the recorded brain signals were input on a computer decoder which mimicked the computations of the brain as it focused.

To the researchers’ surprise, the computer decoder was able to consistently and accurately predict where the monkeys were covertly focusing their attention before they even looked that way — and, even before the onset of a distraction, they were able to predict whether the monkey would be distracted by a visual stimulus.

What’s more, the researchers were able to create focused and distracted states by manipulating neural interactions.

One hypothesis derived from these findings is that there must be a particular amount of interaction between neurons in the prefrontal cortex in order for attention to be properly directed. In children with ADHD, for instance, these interactions may be excessive, causing disruptions in their ability to focus attention.

“It is essential for us is to corroborate this hypothesis in the near future,” said Martinez-Trujillo. “One can imagine that drugs or other interventions that could manipulate interactions between neurons within the prefrontal map could be used to treat disorders of attention (focusing too little or too much).”

The findings may have important implications for those suffering from autism, ADHD and schizophrenia, which all involve disruptions in one’s ability to focus.

“This suggests that we are tapping into the mechanisms responsible for the quality of the attentional focus, and might shed light into the reasons why this process fails in certain neurological diseases such as ADHD, autism and schizophrenia,” Sébastien Tremblay, a doctoral student at McGill and one of the study’s authors, said in a statement. “Being able to extract and read the neuronal code from higher-level areas of the brain could also lead to important breakthroughs in the emerging field of neural prosthetics, where people who are paralysed use their thoughts to control objects in their environment.”

The findings were recently published in the journal Neuron.

Patrick Stewart starred with Jennifer Lawrence in “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” but merely appearing in the credits with Lawrence isn’t enough for the actor. In an EW Facebook chat promoting his new movie “Match,” Stewart said that the actress would be his ideal co-star.

“I’d like to collaborate with Jennifer Lawrence,” he said. “I think she’s brilliant, with a great sense of humor, and quite good looking.”

He also endorsed a Patrick Stewart-Ian McKellen buddy comedy. “It’s a brilliant idea,” he wrote. “Will you write the script for us please? Which of course will have to have approval.”

Attention Hollywood: Let’s get both of these projects in the works, please and thank you.

There has been a recent surge in the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the social sciences. With topics ranging from financial education and tax repayment to organ donation, studies where individuals are (often unknowingly) randomly allocated to different intervention conditions – and then compared to each other – have become increasingly popular. Many researchers, myself included, have heralded this movement as a much-needed development in social science research, as RCTs have the power to generate new insights, especially on the application side of the social sciences. However, the design of RCTs often prevents important questions from being answered while seeming to suggest that they are bringing us closer to the truth. Here, I want to highlight three elements of RCTs that often go unnoticed and that can be useful to consider when evaluating these types of studies (sparked by this recent NYT article): a need for more sophisticated control groups, more careful consideration of other affected behaviors, and better conceptualization of long-term effects.

Although RCTs first appeared in psychology, they were popularized by medicinal research and are today conceived as the “gold standard” for a clinical trial. Conceptually, an RCT is a study where people are randomly allocated to one or more intervention conditions. Thus, it is possible to compare the effectiveness of different interventions while minimizing both known and unknown factors that may influence the possible outcome under investigation. Recently, there has been a return to the use of RCTs in the social sciences. Much of this has been inspired by the rising influence of behavioral approaches to understanding societal issues. Books such as Poor Economics, Nudge, and The Why Axis demonstrate the tremendous potential of cheap and simple interventions to bring about scalable positive changes, often tested via RCTs. Governments around the world are also increasingly relying on the power of RCTs to make policy-relevant decisions. In fact, a former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, made pioneering attempts to introduce the usage of RCTs to make policy decisions into the US government (as described in his book Simpler). To date, over 240 RCTs have been conducted in education research alone, often with great success. For example, randomly assigning some high school students to receive automatic, personalized text messages that reminded them about their college application deadlines increased college enrollment to 70%, compared to 63% in a similar group of students randomly assigned to not receive the messages. This gain is similar to that provided by scholarships, but at only a fraction of the price. In another study, sending parents of middle and high school students personalized text messages when their children did not hand in homework assignments increased homework completion by 25% relative to the homework completion of children whose parents did not receive such messages and made parents twice as likely to reach out to their children’s teachers. In light of such dramatic increases in important behaviors at such low costs, most – if not all – commentators view these types of studies as necessary and are calling to increase these studies’ use. I am fully with them, but we need a better understanding of what RCTs can and cannot do. We also need to be careful to design RCTs appropriately to fully answer the problem at hand. Let me focus on the latter point here: Do RCTs live up to the great expectations placed on them? And if not, as I will argue, how can we design them to be more powerful?

One of the key elements of an RCT is the comparison between an intervention group and a control group. That is, when researchers hypothesize that one group is going to benefit from a given intervention, they compare the behavior of that intervention group to that of a group that did not receive the intervention. Although this rationale carries intuitive appeal, it overlooks the fact that a difference from the no-intervention group does not necessarily suggest that the intervention was successful. Take the case of medicinal research, where the intervention group is often instead compared to a placebo (a sugar pill) because extensive research shows that merely giving a patient a pill carries positive intervention effects. In fact, much medicinal research goes a step further, additionally comparing an intervention condition to the best currently known intervention. If an intervention remains better than these two control conditions, then one can be much more confident in claiming that it truly is effective. A no-intervention condition is therefore not a good control condition on its own. In particular, to be more certain about the validity of an approach, the intervention condition should be compared to three adequate control conditions, consisting of a no-intervention group, a placebo group, and a best-currently-available-intervention group.

When designing RCTs, researchers are often careful to make sure that they adequately measure the downstream behavior they aim to influence. For example, when designing a study to increase college enrollment, measure college enrollment; when designing a study to increase homework completion, measure homework completion. This idea mirrors the design of clinical trials, where the patients’ outcome is evaluated using the same clinically relevant parameters that the chemical compound is hypothesized to affect. Unfortunately, social science research works differently: it requires a better understanding of the underlying psychology at play. As the previous examples highlight, social science RCTs often take the form of reminders that bring the focal element of interest to the front of one’s mind. Researchers’ (often implicit) theory is that by making individuals pay more attention to something, they will in turn be more likely to consider it as important and act upon it. Attention, however, is limited, which implies that bringing something to the front of one’s mind necessarily means devoting less attention to other thoughts, thus potentially reducing other behaviors. Sometimes, this can be good, including when reminders bring college enrollment deadlines to the front of a student’s mind at the cost of less important thoughts, such as “What am I going to wear to senior prom?” At other times, however, a reminder may prompt the devotion of less thought to other important elements, such as when high school students focus on completing their homework at the cost of thinking about college enrollment. Consequently, we need to think more about what other behaviors may be affected by an intervention and then determine the appropriate design to best measure the effects. Otherwise, by looking at just one isolated behavior, we may be missing the bigger picture. A good RCT therefore must demonstrate an increase in the effectiveness of the focal behavior, with no reduction in the frequency of other important behaviors.

RCTs need to have a defined study period in order to be designed and appropriately run. The duration of RCTs varies frequently, with some trials lasting just a few weeks or months, whereas others take years. Researchers track the development of the behavior of interest over time to be able to make claims about the long-term effectiveness of the intervention they introduced. This is important, as an intervention is only really effective if its effects do not fade away over time. Unfortunately, many RCTs are often too short to make adequate claims about the long term, mostly due to cost concerns. Imagine receiving a text every time your child’s homework assignment is late; in the beginning, you may perceive the texts as a helpful notice, and they may prompt you to change your interaction with your child. But will those text messages continue to prompt conversations one year down the line? At what point will you ignore them? It is difficult to answer these questions with an RCT that does not last long enough, and even so, how long is long enough? Six months may be an adequate timeframe to evaluate the long-term effectiveness of receiving messaging about your children’s late homework, but there seems to be a decrease in intervention effectiveness over time (see Figures 5-8, pp. 42-43). An even more important point is whether the effectiveness holds when the intervention is no longer administered. Does sending text messages change habits over the long term, such that parents will more frequently engage with their children? These questions could be answered by tracking former study participants over the long term – yet this is rarely done. Following the example of clinical trials, where it is common practice to check for long-term side effects, is warranted here. Whereas cost concerns explain why RCTs are often too short, it is not that expensive to track participants over time, after the intervention has finished, especially in light of the possible benefits such a design could provide.

RCTs are important. They are an outstanding tool that researchers have to obtain better insights. However, RCTs need to be designed better: we need more intervention arms, better control groups, better definition and measurement of other possibly affected behaviors, and longitudinal designs including follow-ups to evaluate long-term effectiveness. This is not optional; rather, it is mandatory when RCTs are being used to make policy-relevant decisions, as they increasingly are. Some organizations, such as ideas42, the Behavioral Insights Team and J-PAL are showing that this type of design is possible. Although it may take more effort to design RCTs and more money to run them, it is essential for RCTs to be designed better in order to live up to their claims as a powerful methodology against many societal ills.

For more information, please contact the author at www.jonmjachimowicz.com

(Eric McDavid leaves federal court in Sacramento, CA on January 8, 2015, free for the first time in nine years, followed by his attorneys Ben Rosenfeld (left) and Mark Vermeulen. Photo courtesy of David Martinez.)

On January 8, 2015, a federal judge in Sacramento, California granted a joint request by the United States and defense attorneys to release my client Eric McDavid from prison with an eleven year reduction of a 20-year sentence because prosecutors withheld key documents from him at trial. (“‘Eco-Terrorist’ Eric McDavid Gets Released Early From Prison,” Huffington Post, January 9, 2015.) Rather than explain what happened, though, federal officials are trying to skate away with the hollow press statement that “a mistake was made.” They contend they promptly turned over the missing documents upon discovering them, and that they were not important to the defense anyway. Both claims are patently untrue.

McDavid has always asserted that he and his two co-defendants were entrapped by an overzealous FBI and its then 19-year old informant, “Anna.” Anna literally herded the group together, plying them with free transportation, food, and lodging. When they distanced themselves, she delivered them to one another’s doorsteps. When they failed to muster enthusiasm for her schemes, she threw fits, mocked them, and bought them more stuff, including the household chemicals they mixed together to follow her fake incendiary recipe at a cabin wired by the FBI for sound and video. It didn’t work, and the group never agreed to do anything, so there was never any specific conspiracy, save for Anna’s and the FBI’s plot to frame the trio and strut about it. They were all just trying to placate Anna, and McDavid most of all, because he was in love with her.

Contrary to the government’s public relations spin, the documents it withheld were central to Mr. McDavid’s entrapment defense. Clearly, the government recognizes their importance too or it would not have negotiated McDavid’s release. They include love letters to Anna, and evidence she pretended to reciprocate his feelings to keep him on the hook, writing to him, for example, “I think you and I could be great, but we have LOTS of little kinks to work out,” and, “I hope in Indiana we can spend more quality time together, and really chat about life and our things.”

The government’s repeated insistence that it simply overlooked this correspondence strains credulity. Correspondence between an informant and a target is rudimentary evidence in a criminal case. Mr. McDavid’s trial attorney Mark Reichel made it a centerpiece of his cross-examination of the informant, getting her to admit only grudgingly that McDavid had sent her romantic epistles, which she downplayed as containing only a “slight indication that he might have been interested in me.” In point of fact, he opened his heart to her, declaring, for example, “all the endorphins shoot off in my head when ever I think of u.” Prosecutors did nothing to correct the informant’s misleading testimony.

Wittingly or unwittingly, prosecutors pressed their unfair advantage by repeatedly denying there was ever any evidence of romance. In seeking to bar Mr. McDavid’s entrapment defense outright, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ellen Endrizzi told the Judge in 2007: “[T]he defendant has throughout his papers said there was a romantic relationship [but] he has provided no facts of that.” In closing, she told jurors: “There are supposedly love letters. We’ve got evidence of one. Supposedly Mr. McDavid is falling all over himself for Anna. But you have testimony that Anna rebuffed him.”

This falsehood was not a technical foul but a grossly prejudicial error which infected the entire trial and produced a wrongful conviction.

Prosecutors kept up the charade well after Mr. McDavid filed his habeas petition. In October 2012, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Lapham, now a Sacramento Superior Court judge, stated in papers submitted to the Court: “Although McDavid insinuated throughout the trial that there was a romantic relationship between himself and Anna, the evidence was to the contrary.” In the meantime, Mr. McDavid sat in prison for two more years.

The government also withheld evidence that the FBI ordered, then mysteriously canceled, a polygraph examination of Anna the informant, suggesting both that the FBI had doubts about her credibility and that it wanted to bury those doubts at a critical junction in the case, just before Anna roped all of the co-defendants together from around the country for a meeting at Mr. McDavid’s house. It was at that meeting, the government alleged, that the group agreed to do something.

Like the missing correspondence, the polygraph order remained concealed throughout trial. It surfaced only in response to a Freedom of Information Act request which McDavid’s supporters submitted 2-3 years after his conviction. In response, the government produced roughly 2,500 heavily reacted pages while holding back nearly 900 others on various grounds. Among the items redacted in the polygraph order is the mere name of the Assistant U.S. Attorney who signed off on it, concealed for alleged privacy reasons.

Far from turning over the withheld information promptly upon discovering it, as officials claim, the government still has not produced the nearly 900 pages it held back from the FOIA production. Among these, the defense believes, are other emails from Anna the informant to Mr. McDavid, as well as any information underlying the polygraph request, including who ordered it, who cancelled it, and why. Anna’s credibility was everything at trial. She made numerous inflammatory allegations against Mr. McDavid which were uncorroborated by any recordings in the heavily wired case or any other witness. Sandbagged, there was little Mr. McDavid’s trial attorney could do to impeach her. Prosecutors pressed this advantage too, telling the jury in closing: “Your mission is to decide if Anna is telling the truth. … [t]he question, the reason you are here in the first place is to decide whether or not she’s telling the truth.”

The government has also downplayed a declaration by Mr. McDavid’s co-defendant, Zachary Jenson, who cooperated with the prosecution in exchange for leniency. In a letter to the Sacramento Bee, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California Benjamin B. Wagner parrots what the government wrote in its filed response, that Mr. Jenson’s declaration does not contradict anything he testified to at trial. On the contrary, Mr. Jenson’s declaration details how prosecutors pressured him to shade the truth on the stand and squelch what he wanted to say, namely that Anna entrapped Mr. McDavid. (See discussion in Mr. McDavid’s filed habeas reply.)

The U.S. Attorney is correct about one thing: As a condition for being released from prison, Mr. McDavid pleaded guilty to a new felony charge of general conspiracy which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, half the time he had already served. But if McDavid was entrapped, as the evidence overwhelmingly shows, he is in a real sense innocent. Before the FBI fastened Anna the informant onto him and pursued him relentlessly with dirty tricks, he had no predisposition whatsoever to commit the charged offense. Whatever conspiracy he may have joined was a pure artifice of the FBI’s and Anna’s from the start.

The U.S. Attorneys who negotiated Mr. McDavid’s release are not responsible for his entrapment or unfair prosecution. They inherited the case after the fact and acted honorably by helping to correct a grievous injustice. But they need to stop vouching for their predecessors and start conducting an inquiry. Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski recently warned of “an epidemic of Brady [evidence withholding] violations abroad in the land.” Unless and until prosecutors explain their so-called mistake, the public should doubt that’s all it was.

(Eric McDavid embraces his partner Jenny Esquivel following his release as his father George McDavid looks on. Photo courtesy of David Martinez.)