Snow

I was talking to a colleague from NYC on the phone when he asked me if it was snowing in Syracuse. I looked out the window and told him it was partly sunny. I could see shadows and only an inch of snow had fallen in the past six hours.

It has snowed pretty much every day since we got here on January 1, with the exception of a short January thaw with one day of rain. To be more precise, there has been measurable snow on 20 of the last 30 days. Last night it snowed about an inch, but when I walked Joli this morning it was clear. A spotlight full moon lit the fresh snowscape. Everything sparkled and glowed. Subzero snow squeaked under my boots.

The constant presence of snow alters the look and feel of the air. Often a very light snow will fall as the sun peeks through. Snow of two inches or less is never considered significant enough to disturb anyone's plans. The new mayor gave her ”State of the City” address this past week with three inches of snow falling and temperature near zero. Four hundred and fifty people showed up.

Even much more significant snowfall rarely slows things down for long around here. Earlier this week I held video hearings with the Watertown remote site on a day with lake effect snow. For those of you who don't live near Lake Ontario, there is a band about 30 miles wide between Syracuse and Watertown where snow can fall at a terrific rate. Two or more inches an hour with a stiff breeze is not unusual. Interstate 81 traverses this band. It can be clear in Syracuse but only 15 miles north it can be snowing so hard that the entire world is undifferentiated white. Driving in those conditions is beyond hazardous, nonetheless all of the claimants showed up on time for their hearings. One lawyer left Syracuse in time to make the drive, but called me when she hit the snow belt and couldn't see the road. I told her to come back and do the hearing by video with me. After the hearing she genuinely apologized for being such a snow wimp. Everyone here has multiple stories about how they got home when they were caught in a white-out. The favorite is some variation of following a truck or snowplow and ending up in the wrong place.

The snow and the cold have been transformed into a sort of Spartan virtue here. People perk up when telling their favorite snow story. They seem friendlier. We're all in this together, so we might as well find ways to enjoy it. The local media faithfully reports on the “snow race” between the five upstate cities. The winner gets the “Golden Snowball” trophy. http://goldensnowball.com/ Syracuse wins most years and is leading this year with 67.3” as of last night. Buffalo took the prize in 1977 with 199.4” for the season. Syracuse's best was a not too shabby 192.1” in 1993. That's a lot of snow but the totals for the snow belt communities east of Lake Ontario can be much higher. Almost 12 feet of snow fell on Redfield in 2007 in one snow storm. The people there are proud of not paying much attention to how high the snow banks are getting. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17094120/

The parks offer cross country skiing, snow shoeing, sleigh rides, ice fishing and sledding. Snowmobile events fuel the winter economy in the Tug Hill Plateau and the Adirondacks. Many communities around here hold a Winter Carnival with snow & ice sculpture, polar bear plunges, chili cook-offs, human sled dog races and any other silly thing you can imagine doing in the snow. We hope to join the festivities at the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival some time in the next few weeks to see the world renowned Ice Castle. This fine winter celebration has been held in the coldest village in the Adirondacks every year since 1897. http://www.saranaclakewintercarnival.com/ The theme this year is “Adirondack Cowboys.” I can only imagine what that might mean.

Joli likes the snow. She eats it. She pounces on invisible mice that she thinks she hears sneaking through pukak tunnels. http://www.jon-nelson.com/pukak-life-under-the-snow

Merry likes snow. She loves the way snow transforms the outline of everything. She loves feeding the birds and watching them flock to our yard. She doesn't mind the cold and takes great snow photographs. She loves skiing, both cross country and downhill, ice skating and snowshoeing.

Over the years I've lived here the slippery footing, the muscle contracting cold and crystalline air have become a part of me. I missed it while living in St. Louis. I'm glad to be back.

TV Judge

The other night as we waited for dinner to be served at Twin Trees, our favorite pizza & spaghetti joint, we noticed Judge Judy on the TV screen in the corner. We talked for a few minutes about why people agree to have their cases aired on this tacky show, then our salads arrived and we turned to the task at hand, enjoying crumbly blue cheese dressing with fresh greens.

All during the time I was hearing cases in St. Louis, I only conducted a handful of hearings using video-tele-conferencing (VTC). SSA started using VTC about five years ago. Its use has spread as the technology improved. Beginning in late 2007 SSA began to open what it calls “National Hearing Centers” that only hold VTC hearings. I believe every hearing office in the country now has several courtrooms with VTC equipment and the Hearing Office Chief Judges have desktop VTC equipment. We are told more such gear is on the way. Is this the inevitable wave of the future?

The general argument for conducting hearings by VTC is that it is an efficient way to do business. I'm suspicious of this argument. The whole point of holding hearings is to fashion a just application of the law to a complex factual situation. Of course, there are better and worse ways to perform this task, but efficiency can not be the primary goal, justice is.

There are, however, three serious issues that need to be addressed in the SSA hearing system. The primary problem is that a short-sighted hiring freeze during the last ten years created an enormous backlog of hearing applications such that many people are waiting more than two years to have their case decided. This backlog is not evenly distributed across the country. Historic staffing patterns and the new hires of the last three years have created some geographic areas with enough judges to effectively reduce the backlog while other areas are still significantly under-served. Having a group of judges that can “virtually” go anywhere to hear cases by VTC is one way to provide extra hearings where there are inadequate local resources.

The second problem is the vast size of our country and the annoying fact that a fair number of people insist on living far from urban centers. SSA pays travel costs for those who live more than 75 miles from a hearing office, but many people live considerably further away or can not realistically travel a long distance to a hearing. To deliver hearings to these folks most hearing offices operate remote hearing sites. At the Syracuse ODAR there are five such sites in Utica (60 miles east), Binghamton (70 miles south), Watertown (70 miles north), Corning (100 miles southwest) and Ogdensburg/Canton (130 miles northeast). The logistical problems of holding remote hearings can be formidable especially if travel involves crossing one of the most persistent snow belts in the US. The relative ease of holding hearings by VTC becomes especially attractive when faced with a three hour drive in a snow storm.

The third problem is related. The more rural areas obviously have a smaller number of cases. To justify the expense of a hearing trip a fair number of cases must be accumulated. This means that rural folks wait longer than urban folks for their day in court. “Average processing time” seems always to be longer for remote sites. This was true in St. Louis and is true here in Syracuse. When cases have to be rescheduled for any reason the wait is always longer at remote sites. Use of VTC hearings allows a day with a smaller number of hearings to be held anytime, anywhere, or so the argument goes.

Each of these arguments for use of VTC has some merit. I don't oppose some use of VTC, but I personally don't want to use it very much. The reason is simple: TV is a poor substitute for real life. The main reason to even hold hearings in Social Security cases is to allow the claimant a full and fair opportunity to explain why they deserve benefits. As they explain their case to me, I must decide whether what they say makes sense given the medical and other evidence in the case file. To do this I must find ways to get the claimant to talk honestly and openly with me, and I must ask a lot of probing questions to really find out what is happening in the claimant's life. Over my career I've learned how to effectively question people. Good questioning requires a lot of give and take spontaneously informed by what happens during the conversation. Many times I learn things about the claimant that the claimant's lawyer doesn't know. Many times people tell me or show me things during the hearing that completely change my mind about whether or not they deserve benefits.

Such probing questioning can be done by VTC. I've done it, but the effort required is quite a bit higher than in face to face hearings. In even the best VTC there is a short delay between every question and answer that breaks the flow. Sometimes the connection goes down, the screen freezes or the audio cuts out. The big screen TVs are good but it's completely impossible to effectively observe the small details like oil or dirt under the fingernails, or the smell of alcohol. Many claimants don't respond at all well to a TV judge, especially claimants with a mental illness. Back when I represented claimants, I had a client with mental illness who told me she couldn't truthfully answer the questions of ALJ at a VTC hearing because she was just too scared by the lady on the TV. For all these reasons, so long as I have a choice not to use VTC for my hearings, I'm going to opt not to do so.

Corning, NY

I held three days of hearings this last week at the Corning “temporary remote” hearing site serving the south western part of Central New York along the PA border. The only other towns of any size in this area are Elmira, NY and Wellsboro, PA. Nearby are towns with the evocative names of Bath, Painted Post, Horseheads, Penn Yan and Hammondsport. It's a beautiful area. The geography is varied. In the north are three major long deep lakes, Seneca, Cayuga and Keuka, flanked by high hills covered with vineyards and dairy farms. In the south are the wooded hills and deep river valleys of the Allegheny Plateau. This area developed commercially in the early part of the 19^th century due to the transportation corridors of the Susquehanna River valley.

Corning is a small city of about 10,000 on the banks of the Chemung River, one of the tributaries of the Susquehanna. The major employer is Corning, Inc., now primarily a high tech glass manufacturer. You might think of “Corningware,” “Corell,” or “Pyrex,” but today Corning is mostly focused on optical fiber and liquid crystal display technology. Corning is also home to two world class museums, the Corning Museum of Glass http://www.cmog.org/ and the Robert & Hertha Rockwell Museum of Western Art http://www.rockwellmuseum.org/.

Merry, Joli and I drove south Tuesday morning in a light snow. We pulled into the downtown Corning Radisson about 2 ½ hours later. Social Security pledged years ago to phase out “temporary remote” hearing sites, but on the edges of the known world they still exist. Syracuse ODAR has three such sites; the other two are in Watertown and Canton. In each place, makeshift courtrooms are set up in hotel conference rooms. The necessary computer equipment has to be transported and set up daily. There is no electronic link to the SSA mainframe, so files are not always up to date and communication with the office is limited to old fashioned telephones. From my perspective the biggest problem was summed up by the following actual exchange I had with an unrepresented client and her husband:

“I sent you a letter in which I explained your right to counsel in this hearing. Have you decided whether you want to hire a representative?”

“Well, your honor, when we got the letter we weren't sure whether it was a joke, or what. We really didn't think the hearings would be held at a hotel.”

Judges have complained for decades having to use temporary remote sites. On my second day at the Syracuse office I was assured by the Hearing Office Director that concrete plans were underway to replace all three of our temporary remote sites with regular courtrooms. Apparently that will happen as soon as the necessary funds are available. Meanwhile I do the best I can to create a formal courtroom atmosphere in a hotel conference room. I have to admit I did like the short commute to work.

On this visit my exploration was limited to walks to restaurants and early morning walks with Joli. One interesting feature of Corning is its mostly intact historic downtown. It owes this fact to a healthy tourist trade and the flood of 1972. The flood completely inundated downtown, paving the way for redevelopment. The five blocks of restored brick buildings on Market St. have been dubbed “The Gaffer District” (Gaffer being a nickname for a glassblower) to attract tourists. The eastern end of the street has been replaced by three blocks of concrete and glass buildings all of the same architectural style that include the Radisson, City Hall, the police station, a nice outdoor skating rink, an auditorium, the library and some other government services including the Social Security field office. The local hospital is across the street. This combination brings a good mix of locals and tourists downtown, so it continues to thrive.

For such a small town there are a host of good restaurants. We had a gourmet dinner at Three Birds, and very good Indian food at Thali, but the prize for this trip goes to Bento Ya Masako. Open only at lunch four days a week, this hidden gem is worth seeking out. It's up a long flight of stairs over a jewelry store. There is no permanent sign. You know it's open when a signboard with some deflated balloons appears on the sidewalk. Inside a single medium sized room has a few tables, some metal folding chairs and a full kitchen. Masako Takemasa is the chef/owner. She has an assistant at the eight burner stove and a server. The menu on the wall offers about 10 items, each a full lunch. Bento shops are everywhere in Japan. They serve mostly take-away, but sometimes have a place you can sit to eat. Bento meals can be elaborate artistic creations served in compartmentalized lacquered boxes, or, as the case here, just a one plate lunch. I had good-sized piece of soy glazed salmon, carrots tempura, miso soup and steamed spinach with seaweed salad, all for $9. Merry had yakisoba noodles with appropriate sides. The place was packed. Take-out was non-stop. The walls are decorated with photographs of the amazing glass engraving art of Takeo Takemasa, Masako's husband, who works at the Steuben art glass division of Corning www.kuripa.co.jp/glass-art/cgi-bin/ag_personal.cgi?lang=en&id=215#  A visit to this authentic bento shop is a very inexpensive trip to Japan.

It looks like I'll be holding hearings in Corning about every five weeks. No doubt there will be more dispatches from the southern frontier soon.

Dick's Heart Attack

The big Mayflower moving van arrived at our house in Syracuse on Tuesday. The original plan was for Sunday, but the truck broke down on the way. We were actually happy to have some time to recuperate from the trauma of packing up the St. Louis house and making the two day drive. It seemed to take us longer to pack this time. Then at the last minute we found we had wrongly estimated the capacity of our car and had to leave some things behind. The 900 mile drive to Syracuse was made more difficult by a persistent light snow with fog and drizzle all the way. We stopped in Buffalo on New Year's Eve, two and a half hours short of Syracuse. By the time we got home on Friday, January 1 we were totally exhausted.

Over the weekend we tried to recuperate. We slept on the fold-out couch in the living room. It started to seriously snow Friday and by Sunday it had snowed a foot and a half. That was fine with us. We were safe and warm and needed sleep. By early Tuesday morning the snow slowed down, we cleared the walks and steps and felt ready for the movers.

I had to work, so Merry got the job of supervising the movers. A glitch developed soon after the movers arrived. The debit card giving access to our bank in St. Louis didn't work. Since I was downtown, I ran over to our Syracuse bank and got a bank check to pay the movers. When I called Merry to tell her I had the money, I sensed anxiety in her voice. Instead of agreeing to run down to pick up the check, she asked if I could take the bus home as soon as possible because things were hectic. I was a bit puzzled, but agreed. I got permission to leave early and hopped on a city bus.

The moving van was parked out front. Three guys were marching in and out carrying boxes, furniture, tools, etc. at a pretty good clip. Merry was standing in the open front door with a clipboard checking off the inventory. As soon as I walked up she handed me the clipboard and told me she had to leave to go to the hospital. She quickly explained that as I was talking to her on the phone earlier, Dick, one of the movers, was having a heart attack on our steps.

Dick is a very fit and strong guy of 49, but smokes and probably eats a lot of fried fast food at truck stops in his life on the road. We learned that the driver and the crew are all from a little town south of Morgantown, WV. Dick grew up doing farm chores on a poor tenant farm. “My daddy worked me pretty hard, I can tell you that.” Before deciding to do long haul moving with his boyhood friend, Dave, Dick worked as a welder on small oil and gas drilling rigs around the northeast. His only prior trip to Syracuse was during a gas rig job some years ago. He was randomly playing a numbers game to pass the time in a restaurant in Corning, NY when he hit for $3000. He drove the three hours north to Syracuse to collect his winnings.

On Tuesday morning Dick was hauling boxes of our stuff into the house when he suddenly felt lightheaded. He was sweating profusely. He insisted to Merry that he was OK, but he stayed seated on the steps rather than continuing to work. It was at this point I called home about the check. The situation was unsettled so Merry knew she couldn't leave right then to come downtown. When Dick didn't recover right away, Merry got Dave, the driver, to talk to him. After a parlay, Dick and Dave agreed to let Merry drive Dick to the ER to get checked out. While preparing to leave, it dawned on Mer how serious the situation was. Instead of getting into the car she dialed 911. This decision may have saved Dick's life.

Merry described Dick's symptoms accurately and without drawing any conclusions. The 911 operator quickly determined this was a genuine emergency and dispatched a crash truck. The fire station is only two blocks from our house. The firefighters were there literally in two minutes. Dick was stabilized and transported to the nearest emergency room.

For the rest of the day cardiologists ran tests on Dick while the other three guys unloaded our stuff. I took over inventory duty. Merry visited Dick in the ER and discovered he was not going to die. Later in the afternoon when the move was over, Merry and the driver Dave went back to the ER. While they were gone I tried to entertain the other two movers. We assembled the bed then I got out Christmas cookies and warmed up some hot chocolate. As I stood around the kitchen with these two guys in their late teens from the backwoods of WV I quickly ran out of topics of conversation. Their interests were pretty much limited to four-wheelers, video games, and the lives of their family members. One told me that the state sends all the crazy people to his town. The other said his grandpa could build anything out of wood and he hoped he would help him build a log home. Both had graduated from high school by the skin of their teeth and both thought they would like full time work as welders on drilling rigs, just like Dick had done.

Thankfully Merry and Dave soon returned. The medical staff refused to give them any detailed information since neither was related to Dick. Dick was confused whether to stay for more tests or sign himself out so he could travel on with the truck. We agreed that Dave would take the boys to the local truck stop for something to eat, and that Merry and I would go back to talk with Dick. In the ER I questioned Dick closely and was able to convince him to stay for one more test. We told him we would provide him with transport back to the truck or to the bus station whichever he needed. A couple of hours later Dick was released. His heart attack was mild. He was stable. We picked him up and drove him to the truck stop to join the crew. Along the way he told us he believed the invention of the round baler had ruined the younger generation. No question that throwing hay bales all day instills a good work ethic.

We dropped Dick off at the moving van where the others were engaged in folding the dozens of pads used to protect our furniture. We hope he made it back safely to WV and that he'll get on-going treatment for his heart. In retrospect, I'm very impressed with the way Merry acted in this difficult situation. She never took control away from Dick or Dave, but at the same time made it possible for them to make the right decisions about Dick's health. She's a potent combination of Florence Nightingale and Super Girl. Just one more reason I love her.

Philosophical Reflection: Avatar

Two weekends ago my wife Merry and I took a break from getting ready to move to Syracuse by going to the new movie Avatar. I'm both curious and skeptical when a movie is promoted as a blockbuster. In this case my skepticism was overcome by the promise of a completely new and convincing 3-D experience. The new form of 3-D works. The visuals are a treat. The alien creatures are pretty neat too, if derivative. I'm not going to review the movie here. A plot summary can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)

From a philosophical point of view the interesting thing about Avatar is that it simultaneously takes both sides of a long running philosophical/religious argument called the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is an exploration of the meaning of consciousness. The question is whether there exists an entity separate from the body, called the mind, that does our thinking and controls the body. Religious thinkers say “yes” and identify consciousness with the soul, even positing that it pre-exists the body and survives it after death. Scientists say “no” and argue that the mind is nothing more than a very complex bundle of specialized nerve cells called the brain. In the scientific view consciousness is an artifact of the way our brains are wired to our body, not something separate.

The basic premise of Avatar requires belief in the existence of a controlling soul totally separable from the brain. The frequent use of giant robot fighting machines controlled by human operators who sit inside the head shows how much the movie loves this idea. Similarly, an avatar, as envisioned in the movie, is an alien body inhabited and controlled by a human operator. We are told that this is accomplished by “mixing DNA from the aliens with human DNA” and growing a clone alien body to adulthood. Mixing in human DNA makes the alien body “receptive” to human control, but only by the human from which the DNA was taken. OK, just how does that work?

On the planet Pandora there is a lab where humans lie in something resembling a high tech tanning bed and have their consciousness “projected” into their specially grown alien bodies. In the lab the alien bodies are attached to the human brains by electronic leads of some sort, but as soon as the link is established they operate by some sort of advanced biological Wi-Fi technology, or ESP or something.

As soon as the hero, Jake, is linked with his alien body he totally inhabits it. He can run, see, smell, feel and do acrobatics. Only seconds before the alien body was completely inert in its test tube. Jake's body, meanwhile, is lying inert in its tanning bed, but aware of everything his alien body is doing. The alien body apparently has no mind of its own. When Jake's tanning bed is turned off, his alien body goes into a coma from which it cannot be awakened and Jake's consciousness returns to his human body. For this shuttling of consciousness to work at all, the mind must be separable from the body.

Interestingly, the design of the planet Pandora is based in large part on how consciousness really works. Grace, the good scientist, discovers that there are billions of neural connections between all the living things on the planet. She argues that this complex of all living things constitutes a consciousness that ought not be tinkered with. Further, the alien creatures all have a braided ponytail that ends in neural contacts allowing them to tap into the network of their living world. They use this built-in contact to communicate with animals and with their living god.

As currently defined by cognitive science, consciousness works pretty much like that. It is a complex of billions of neural connections primarily but not exclusively located in our brain. Our brains are born with a gigantic number of the connections already in place. This hard wiring develops into who we uniquely are by adding millions of new neural connections daily. We call the connections of which we are aware experience and later we call them memories. Consciousness as seen by science consists entirely of the complex of neural links in our brain built up over our lifetime. It does not and cannot exist independently of our own body.

Even before cognitive science started to show how the brain creates consciousness, some philosophers “solved” the mind-body problem by showing it was a classic category mistake. To categorize one thing as “the body” and another “the mind” requires that you believe at the outset there are two such separate things, thus presupposing the answer. The correct question is “What is consciousness?” not “How do the mind and body relate?”

In a nutshell, Jake can't transfer his consciousness to the alien body because there isn't anything to transfer. Even a brain transplant (if possible) won't work because new experience from the alien body would quickly make Jake into something else. Indeed, as the story progresses Jake slowly becomes the alien body he inhabits. Ironically, Avatar ends with Jake's human consciousness being transferred permanently into his alien body by way of Pandora's complex neural network, thus solving the problem. Maybe the director knew all along that the avatar idea was based on a fallacy. Maybe not.