Word: aaas
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...their tweed for military fatigues and leave the halls of academe for the front lines. For the past two years, the U.S. military has embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with American troops in order to improve the Army's cultural IQ. But last week the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a report coming out strongly against the program, saying that in both concept and application, it "can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology...
...military's program is to continue its expansion in Afghanistan with the nation's top scholars, it may be facing an uphill battle. The AAA says the program violates its code of ethics - a sort of Hippocratic oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm. Two years ago, the AAA condemned the HTS program, but this month's 72-page report goes into much greater detail about the potential for the military to misuse information that social scientists gather. Some anthropologists involved in the report say it's already happening. David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martin...
...Still, Wintersteen, who is waiting to be sent to Iraq through HTS, says the AAA's decision to attack the program will ultimately put more lives in danger by undermining the organization's ability to provide guidance and dissuading top talent from joining. So far, HTS has struggled to bring in topflight social scientists with regional knowledge. "It hurts HTS and the people downrange like the American soldiers and the locals who depend on the rational analysis that anthropology brings," Wintersteen says. In his training class of about 50 people, there were only about 13 social scientists, five with Ph.D.s...
These are damning statements, but here again, the devil is in the details. The CLASS Act in Reid's Senate bill is considerably stronger in fiscal terms, according to the American Academy of Actuaries (AAA), than the much criticized act as outlined in the House and HELP committee bills. "There have been quite a few changes in the right direction," says Steven Schoonveld, an actuary who wrote the original critical AAA report on the CLASS Act in the HELP bill...
There is still plenty of room for improvement, according to the AAA. The CLASS Act doesn't include sufficient funding to market the program, meaning participation will be low - the CBO says 5% of the population would sign up, the CMS actuary says 2.5%, and AAA says 6%. Such low participation would not allow risk to be spread out enough to keep premiums affordable; in that case, the program could end up in an "insurance death spiral," in which premiums are so high, only those who know they'll need coverage sign up, driving up premiums even further until they...