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A call for cohabitation reform

The problem with the current law on cohabitation is that there isn’t one. Despite popular belief, there is no such thing as a common law marriage (it has not existed since 1753) and separating couples have very minimal legal rights or protection.

This often leads to the more financially vulnerable party potentially facing hardship and difficulties. Coupled with the fact that cohabitation is the fastest growing family type in the UK, it is time this inequality is addressed.

So, we asked Sushma Kotecha, Managing Partner from our Nottingham office to join us on the blog to add her voice to the continuing calls for cohabitation reform.

“Almost half of us mistakenly believe that common law marriage exists. The findings from this year’s British Social Attitudes Survey carried out by The National Centre for Social Research revealed that 46% of people surveyed are under the false impression that cohabiting couples form a common law marriage. This figure remains largely unchanged over the last fourteen years (47% in 2005) despite a significant increase in the number of cohabiting couples.

Cohabitees cannot rely on UK family courts. As it currently stands, there is very little legal protection for cohabitees who separate and need to resolve disputes that may have arisen in respect of property, finances and/or children. The law in this area is very complex and can lead to unfair outcomes.

For this reason, more people are turning to Cohabitation/Living Together Agreements to record the financial arrangements that are to apply in respect of their cohabitation and what should happen if their relationship fails.

Cohabitation/Living Together Agreements are contracts that can include provisions dealing with income, property, children, wills and legacies and many other issues that may be relevant.

Anne Barlow, Professor of Family Law and Policy at the University of Exeter said:

“Our data clearly shows that almost half of us falsely believe that common law marriage exists in England and Wales when, in reality, cohabitation grants no general legal status to a couple. Cohabiting couples now account for the fastest growing type of household and the number of opposite sex cohabiting couple families with dependent children has more than doubled in the last decade. Yet whilst people’s attitudes towards marriage and cohabitation have shifted, the policy has failed to keep up with the times.

The result is often severe financial hardship for the more vulnerable party in the event of separation, such as women who have interrupted their career to raise children. Therefore, it’s crucial that we raise awareness of the difference between cohabitation, civil partnership and marriage and any differences in rights that come with each.”

Notwithstanding a call for reform from lead bodies and Judges, the government has resisted implementing proposed changes that would make the system fairer for separating cohabitees.

Lord Marks’ Cohabitation Rights Bill has had its second reading and Resolution (a body of specialist family lawyers and other professionals) will be liaising with Lord Marks about laying the bill again in the next parliamentary session.

When this was debated in Parliament in 2014, the number of people cohabiting in the UK had risen from less than 3 million in 1996 to 5.9 million. The figure is now 6.6 million, and this rate of increase is not abating.

The Office for National Statistics’ 2018 figures shows that cohabiting families are the fastest growing family form and a quarter of all children are growing up in cohabiting families. About 40% of cohabiting couples have children together while cohabiting. The Bill is aimed not just at those couples but at their children, who stand to suffer from their parents break up.

If you intend to cohabit or are currently cohabiting and wish to regulate your rights in the event of a relationship break up to avoid the pitfalls and injustice of the existing laws, please contact our Client Care Team here to arrange an initial no-obligation options call with one of our lawyers.

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Author: Sushma Kotecha

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Husband succeeds in recovering painting, despite wife’s lies

As I have said many times, both here and to my own clients when I was practising, getting a final order is often only half of the battle when it comes to sorting out financial arrangements following divorce. The other half comes in actually enforcing that order.

Despite the importance of enforcement, we don’t see an awful lot of cases about it reported. However, we did get at least a glimpse of it in the case ET v ST, which was decided by Mr Justice Mostyn in April last year, but which only recently appeared on the Bailii website. The case is also of interest because of the wife’s attempts to thwart the enforcement action.

The case revolved around the husband’s attempts to recover a painting by the artist Caziel. The painting was amongst the contents of a property that it had been agreed should be retained by the husband. That agreement was incorporated into a consent order in July 2011.

For the benefit of those, including myself, who are not art experts Caziel was, according to Wikipedia, “a Polish artist who lived and worked in Paris during the inter-war period and who worked alongside a number of important figures of the School of Paris, including Pablo Picasso”. Despite that illustrious connection, I don’t think his paintings are especially valuable – a quick internet search reveals them being sold for anything between a few hundred pounds and five thousand pounds. We are not told how much the painting in this case is worth, although obviously it could also have had sentimental value to the husband.

By October 2017 the painting had not been delivered up to the husband by the wife, and the husband therefore commenced enforcement proceedings.

On three occasions the wife had told the court that she had not seen the painting for some years, and implied that the husband had taken it. Two of those statements were made under oath from the witness box, and one in a written witness statement endorsed with a statement of truth. However, in another witness statement in January 2018 the wife admitted that her earlier statements had been untrue – she did know the whereabouts of the painting.

Following this, the painting was recovered by the husband, although not before the husband had issued an application for the wife to be committed to prison for breach of the order.

There still, however, remained the issue of the husband’s costs, both of the enforcement action and of the committal proceedings. In addition to this, the husband sought permission from the court to proceed with committal proceedings against the wife in respect of both her false witness statement and her lies under oath. These issues fell to Mr Justice Mostyn to determine.

Dealing with the committal application first, Mr Justice Mostyn refused permission for the husband to proceed. The reason for this is that he considered that the husband had a better avenue available to him: criminal proceedings against the wife for perjury, which carry with them a maximum prison sentence of seven years. We are not told whether or not the husband chose to take this course.

As to the issue of costs, Mr Justice Mostyn felt it unarguable that the husband should recover his costs relating to the enforcement action. As to the committal application, Mr Justice Mostyn felt that the husband had pursued this “in a very single-minded way”, despite the fact that he had achieved his primary aim, which was to recover the painting. Accordingly, Mr Justice Mostyn only ordered the wife to pay 50% of the husband’s costs in relation to the committal application.

An interesting little case, illustrating quite typical enforcement issues: one party having to go back to the court to recover an asset that should have been delivered to them, and the other party lying to the court in an attempt to thwart them. The case is also perhaps an illustration of the perils of being over-zealous when it comes to enforcement: one can fully understand the husband’s annoyance at the wife’s lies, and his determination that she should not ‘get away’ with them, but in the end his actions cost him money that he was not able to recover.

You can read the full judgment here.

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Author: John Bolch

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Tulipomania

Tulips at an Amsterdam flower market

The quest for the perfect tulip

In his 1850 novel The Black Tulip, French author Alexandre Dumas (père) describes a competition, initiated by the Dutch city of Haarlem in the 1670s, in which 100,000 florins (150 florins being the average yearly income at the time) would be given to the first person who could grow a black tulip. Although Dumas’s story is fictional, it is based on a real phenomenon that took place in the Netherlands in the early 17th century.

Between 1634 and 1637, the Netherlands (then called the United Provinces) saw the rise and fall of many fortunes due to an intense period of tulip trading. Now described as tulipomania, or simply tulip mania, it involved the wild overvaluation of certain types of tulip, leading to the eventual crash of the inflated market.

In Rare Form

First cultivated in the East, tulips were brought to Europe from the Ottoman Empire during the 16th century (the name tulip is derived from the Turkish word for turban). Soon after their introduction, tulips became popular in various countries, but nowhere so much as in the Netherlands. There are many theories as to why the Dutch developed such an avid interest in tulips; in his book The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan suggests that the bleakness of the Dutch landscape may be one reason colorful tulips were so quickly embraced. He observes that “what beauty there is in the Netherlands is largely the result of human effort…” making the cultivation of beautiful blooms an attractive pastime.

Another reason for their popularity was their relative rarity. While tulips can be grown simply from seed, there is no guarantee that the resulting flowers will resemble their parent plants at all. The only way to obtain a particularly prized bloom is to grow one from an offset, which Pollan describes as “the little, genetically identical bulblets” found at the base of a tulip bulb. The process of cultivating offsets was a lengthy one, adding to the scarcity of tulips. In addition, the most valued tulips of the time were ones said to be “broken,” that is those tulips with bright flame or feather-like patterns on their petals. The most famous of this type of tulip was the Semper Augustus, a white flower marked by brilliant red strokes. These tulips produced fewer offsets, making them even rarer; although it was not known at the time, the “broken” effect was caused by a virus that weakened the plant.

Gone to Seed

The genesis of tulipomania is usually ascribed to the 1593 arrival in Leiden of Carolus Clusius, a plant collector and gardener. Bringing with him some tulip bulbs he had acquired while working as the director of the Imperial Botanical Garden in Vienna, Clusius proceeded to cultivate beautiful specimens from them, attracting attention from his new neighbors. However, Clusius was reluctant to part with his bulbs, refusing to sell to eager buyers. Frustrated by his refusal, thieves helped themselves to his garden, stealing many bulbs and selling the seeds they gained from them. These seeds were eventually distributed throughout all the Dutch territories, leading to the increased propagation and variation of tulips. Those lucky enough to grow a particularly beautiful bloom from seed could profit greatly from the sale of its offsets, making tulip cultivation an increasingly lucrative vocation.

As the taste for certain types of tulip became more focused, prices for the most valued bulbs rose dramatically among the upper classes. At first limited to collectors and the wealthy, the large amounts of money to be made soon inspired people of more limited means to sell everything they had to cash in on the trade. At the market’s highest point, single bulbs sold for thousands of florins, the most famous being a Semper Augustus bulb that sold for 6,000 florins (or 40 times the average yearly income).

As more people entered the trade, eventually the sale of real bulbs gave way to windhandel, or wind trade, meaning the future production of bulbs was bought and sold. This increasingly risky venture couldn’t last. The tulip bubble burst in February 1637 when the fear of oversupply and dramatic price increases in early 1637 caused prices to drop precipitously.

Back Petal

While the story of tulip mania often gets told as a cautionary tale and as an analogue to more modern forms of market inflation and decline, such as the dotcom bubble, historian Anne Goldgar thinks this description is overblown. In her book, Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, Goldgar finds that tulip speculation in reality was not as frenzied as the way it is commonly portrayed. She blames the writer Charles Mackay, whose book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds from 1841 used satirical songs from 1637 as the basis for his depiction of the craze for tulips, which had a tendency to exaggerate the facts of the situation. Far from being irrational, Goldgar argues that there were valid reasons for treating tulips as a valuable commodity, and that the subsequent rise and fall of the market was not as precipitous, and did not personally bankrupt, hordes of unlucky investors.

Dutch Treat

Although this volatility in the tulip market was unsettling at the time, out of that early trade came an enduring business for the Netherlands. Now the tulip is a beloved symbol of the country, and plays an important role in economic and cultural activities. It seems unlikely that anyone at the time the tulip came to the Netherlands could have predicted the enormous effect this flower would have over a nation’s history and economy. It is a vivid reminder that when human nature meets Mother Nature, interesting results are sure to follow.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on April 6, 2007.

Image credit: Alice Achterhof alicegrace [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons


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Author: Morgen Jahnke

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How to keep divorce out of court? (Part 2)

Sarah Snow, Partner at our London Victoria office is back on the blog to look at how arbitration and negotiation can help you keep your divorce out of court.

Arbitration

I pick this article back-up with a look at arbitration, the closest parties will come to the court process without having to go to court. It is a form of dispute resolution that takes place out of the courtroom. Both parties will appoint a suitability trained and qualified arbitrator, their decision is final and binding upon the parties.

The benefits of arbitration are that parties are able to resolve disputes in a less formal setting. The process is often quicker than court proceedings as parties are not dependant on the court listing and scheduling of hearings, which can often take several months if a court is particularly busy. Parties can also be ensured of continuity, instructing the same arbitrator throughout the process, opposed to court proceedings where you may see a different judge at each hearing. However, as with collaborative law, there is no power to compel disclosure and may not be suitable if one half of the couple is hiding assets although the arbitrator can draw adverse findings if satisfied that something has not been disclosed and can also award costs. Indeed, engaging in arbitration is something that both parties must be willing to do.

This is a viable alternative dispute to the court process for divorcing couples and can address wide ranging issues such as determining an entire financial award down to a narrow issue such as how to deal with a pension. There are also arbitrators who specialise in determining arrangements for children.

It may feel like you are “going private” as you do pay the costs of the arbitrator as well as the costs of your lawyer but you may feel this is worth it to get a final decision more quickly, in a more comfortable environment than the court and by an arbitrator who you can be confident is a specialist in family law rather than a Judge who may have been a lawyer who specialised in a different area of law. The other benefit to an arbitration process is that it is completely confidential so that there are no risks of the press attending your hearing as they sometimes can do if your case is in court.

The flexibility and the fact that you will get a final decision more quickly can make arbitration more cost-effective than court.

Negotiations via solicitors

This is probably the most common way in which most matters are resolved. Lawyers are both specialists in the law and will know what the likely outcomes might be, and they will also be experts in negotiation and how to present your case in the best possible way. The process essentially involves solicitors negotiating on divorcing parties’ behalf. If the matter concerns financial arrangements, then there needs to be an exchange of financial disclosure so that there is a full understanding of what resources are available. Negotiation can then take place over correspondence, by telephone discussion or sometimes via what is known as a roundtable meeting where both parties and their lawyers are present.

However, if negotiations break down then court or arbitration may be the only alternatives available. It is important therefore that negotiations do not continue for too long if it is evident that an agreement cannot be reached because if you commence either the court or arbitration options too late this will increase the costs beyond those originally anticipated. However, with arbitration it may be that the negotiations have narrowed down the issues to only a few points, which the arbitrator can be asked to decide upon therefore saving the costs of arguing about everything.  It is important to ensure that a timetable for disclosure and negotiations is set out by the parties’ solicitors from the start to ensure that matters are not allowed to drift over many months without moving forward.

Whichever way you go

Ultimately it is important to note that whichever chosen approach to resolving matters voluntarily and without court proceedings, both parties must be motivated by a shared desire to be open, transparent, pragmatic and compromising.

Without such an approach any method of Alternative Dispute Resolution is unlikely to be successful. In conclusion, I revert to the age-old adage delivered to many clients by their solicitors, “it is often better to have an agreement you can both live with, rather than an order imposed on you by the court which neither of you is happy with”.

Get in touch

For more advice on how to keep your divorce out of court you can contact our Client Care Team here or at the number below.

You can read part 1 here.

 

The post How to keep divorce out of court? (Part 2) appeared first on Stowe Family Law.


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Author: Sarah Snow

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Do we need a domestic abuse register?

A headline on BBC News before Easter read: “Mother calls for ‘domestic abuse register’”. The headline refers to the mother of Jayden Parkinson, the teenager who was brutally murdered by her former boyfriend, Ben Blakeley. Blakeley was found guilty of strangling 17 year old Jayden, who was expecting his child, and burying her body in his uncle’s grave. He is currently serving a life sentence, with a minimum term of twenty years.

Crucially, it came to light in the course of the murder trial that Blakeley had a history of violence towards previous partners. Three former girlfriends gave evidence against him, including one who said he had pushed her down the stairs when she was seven months pregnant.

Now Jayden’s mother is calling for a register to be kept “to keep track of the activities of perpetrators of domestic abuse, violence and stalking” (according to the BBC report). She is quoted as saying of Jayden: “She’d be here now, because for all the agencies at the point when Jayden went missing, to them she was a pain-in-the-butt teenager… and if that register had been here, and they’d all looked at it, they’d have seen how vulnerable she was.”

But what exactly would such a register contain, and do we need it? Or to put it another way, would such a register make a difference?

Now, this is a complex issue, and I could not possibly do justice to it in one short blog post. However, think it is worthwhile to set out a few initial thoughts.

The first question that comes to mind is: Who goes on the register? Is it just those who are convicted of a criminal offence related to domestic abuse? Or would those against whom a family court has made a domestic abuse injunction also be included? If the latter, then two further thoughts come to mind.

Firstly, that many allegations made in the family courts are of a quite ‘low-level’ nature – would all of these trigger inclusion on the register? Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not trivialising domestic abuse. There is no excuse for any of it, but it seems rather extreme to put someone whose actions were not particularly serious on a register. Remember, being on such a register could seriously affect the liberty of that person.

The second, linked, point is that this could lead to an awful lot of people going on to the register. That could lead to one of two effects, both of which would ‘water down’ the idea: that it is impossible to gauge the risk posed by any particular person on the register, or that everyone on the register is considered to be ‘high risk’, even when many of them are not.

And can a perpetrator ever get their name off the register? As I said, being on the register would be a serious matter. Save in the most serious of cases it would surely be unfair to be on it automatically for life, but what must the perpetrator do to show that they are no longer a risk? Or would they simply come off it after a set period of time, as with rehabilitation of offenders? These are questions that would have to be answered.

But the biggest question is the one I’ve already asked: would such a register make a difference?

As suggested by Jayden’s mother, the register could be checked by any agencies involved in the welfare of a vulnerable person. I suppose those agencies could have procedures in place to ensure that the register is checked, when appropriate. However, such cases will surely be comparatively rare. Presumably, the register could be viewed by any member of the public who is concerned about a (potential) partner. However, realistically, how many people entering into a relationship will do this? If you have any concerns about a partner, you will act on those concerns (if you are able to), without needing to look at a register.

And lastly there are already two mechanisms in place which have a similar effect to such a register, both of which were mentioned in the BBC article. Firstly, convicted domestic abusers and stalkers are already captured on the Police National Computer (although that cannot of course be access by the general public), and secondly, we already have the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme, better known as ‘Clare’s Law’, which allows the police to disclose information on request about a person’s domestic abuse history. I’m not sure how much a domestic abuse register would add to this.

Nobody knows for certain whether Jayden would still have been alive today if there had been a register. Certainly, the possibility that she could be makes a powerful argument in favour. However, there are clearly some serious questions to be answered before a register is put in place.

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Author: John Bolch

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Superautomatic Coffee Machines

A De'Longhi Superautomatic Coffee Machine

The lazy way to make a perfect cup of coffee

There are those who believe half the pleasure of a great cup of coffee comes from the ritual of making it. The details of the ritual vary from person to person and place to place, but the desired effect is the same: a perfect cup of hot, rich, fresh coffee. “Perfect,” of course, is quite subjective. Among people who take coffee seriously, there is a great deal of disagreement as to what types of bean, roast, and grind make the best coffee, how concentrated the grounds should be, whether the coffee should be infused into the water by dripping, steeping, or steaming, and many other details. Regardless of the precise outcome, however, coffee purists often insist that if you want coffee done right, you must make it by hand, with a great deal of care and attention to detail.

I certainly count myself among those who cherish a perfect cup of coffee. And yet, I’ve never been much for ritual. All things being equal, I’d prefer to have my coffee with as little effort as possible, but I draw the line at those trendy machines with the prefilled plastic pods (you know, Keurig K-Cups, Nespresso, and the like)—the beans are not freshly ground, there’s too much waste, it’s too expensive per cup, and you have too little control over the final product. Fortunately, technology allows me to have my café and drink it too, thanks to a breed of coffee maker known as a superautomatic.

Coffee Making 101

First, a few background concepts about coffee brewing. The standard American method for making coffee is to allow hot water to drip through a filter full of ground beans and then into a carafe sitting on a hot plate. You’ll get eight or ten cups of coffee this way in about five minutes. While operating the coffee maker itself is usually just a matter of flipping a switch, that doesn’t include measuring and pouring the water, inserting the filter, measuring the ground coffee, or disposing of the used grounds. (Add another step or two if you grind your own coffee beans—which you should.) The end result is a relatively dilute coffee whose taste rapidly deteriorates as it ages and evaporates. The person who drinks the first cup often has a much better experience than the one who drinks the last cup.

By contrast, espresso is made one or two cups at a time by forcing steam into a much finer grind of coffee and through a metal filter that allows slightly larger particles of grounds through than a paper filter would. This normally results in a stronger coffee, mainly because less water is used; if you kept forcing steam through the grounds for a longer period of time, the coffee would become increasingly weak, eventually reaching the strength most North Americans consider normal. (Think of the Americano, which is just espresso diluted with hot water.) Making espresso (and its milk-added cousins cappuccino and latte) is normally an exacting manual procedure, but one that results in a fresher cup because the coffee never sits around in a carafe becoming bitter.

I’ll Have a Digital Cappuccino

A superautomatic coffee machine uses the pressurized steam method of coffee production to make a single cup of coffee at a time, but without any of the manual steps. With the press of a single button, the machine grinds beans stored in an internal hopper; tamps them down into the filter assembly; squirts steam through them into your cup, then ejects the used grounds into a holding bin. The whole process takes about a minute, and it produces a wonderfully rich, creamy coffee. Most superautomatics allow you to adjust a wide variety of settings, such as the coarseness of the grind, the amount of ground coffee per cup, and the volume and temperature of the coffee. With various combinations of settings, you can get a tiny cup of ultra-concentrated espresso, a large mug of American-style coffee, or anything in between. (My personal preference is Swiss-style café crema, which is stronger than American but weaker than espresso, served in a demitasse cup with a golden foamy finish.)

My wife’s favorite feature of our first superautomatic was its automatic milk frother. This is not simply a wand that squirts steam into a container of milk (though you can do that too if you want). Instead, you drop a small hose into a container of milk, press a button, and the machine sucks in the cold milk and delivers hot frothed milk from a nozzle right into your coffee cup. The frother enabled us to make an excellent cappuccino by pressing exactly two buttons. (Due to reasons, our current superautomatic lacks a frother, but we’ll think about that again the next time we’re in the market for a new model.) Depending on the model and manufacturer, superautomatics have a variety of additional features. Some have a built-in cup warmer, an internal water filtering system, or a second steam pump so that they can brew coffee and steam milk at the same time. Programmable digital models feature an alphanumeric display and one-touch access to popular features, to save your delicate fingers from having to physically move levers or knobs to adjust settings.

You Can Put a Price on True Happiness

Superautomatics don’t come cheap. A good mid-range model, with a digital display and most of the bells and whistles, will run in the neighborhood of US$1,500. A high-end consumer machine can go for as much as $6,000 (which, by the way, is a bargain compared to commercial models); on the other end of the spectrum, if you’re willing to forgo a few of the more esoteric frills, you can find a good basic unit for as little as $500. Unsurprisingly, superautomatics are a frequent cause of buyer’s remorse, which means some good bargains on lightly used machines can often be found on eBay or at dealers with money-back guarantees.

The best-known manufacturers of superautomatic coffee machines are Saeco, Jura, De’Longhi, and Miele, all of which offer a wide selection of models in various price ranges. However, don’t expect to find a great selection of such machines on display at your local Wal-Mart. High-end kitchen stores like Sur la Table and Williams-Sonoma carry superautomatics; apart from that, your best bet is usually an online retailer (such as Seattle Coffee Gear) with a good return policy. Also be prepared to get picky when it comes to coffee beans. Shiny, oily beans are to be avoided; a dark but dry bean such as Illy will make your superautomatic purr.

I Love the Java Jive and It Loves Me

You may be thinking: My generic $25 drip coffee maker works just fine. Why should I spend such an outrageous amount of money on a fancy coffee machine? Sure, the coffee from these machines may be excellent, but is it really worth the difference in price? Speaking for myself, the answer is yes. The combination of outstanding coffee and one-button convenience is worth quite a lot to me, and I’ve never regretted buying either of the two superautomatic coffee machines I’ve owned. Needless to say, superautomatics are not for everyone. If you don’t drink much coffee or can’t tell the difference between instant and fresh-brewed, a superautomatic is a frivolous investment. On the other hand, if you are—or aspire to be—a coffee connoisseur, this marvel of engineering may lead you to wonder what you ever found so endearing about your beloved French press or copper coffee pot.

Since I bought my first superautomatic, my contributions to the Starbucks empire have fallen off dramatically. My kitchen may not have quite the ambiance of a local coffee shop, but the wireless network is faster and the coffee is better. That digital biscotti maker is still a dream, but I always know where to get a good cup of Joe.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on April 8, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on June 7, 2004.

Image credit: De’Longhi Deutschland GmbH [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons


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Author: Joe Kissell

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Take Control of Your Browser

Take Control of Your Browser cover

For most of us, the one app we couldn’t possibly live without is a web browser. You can do almost anything in a browser these days…but are you browsing with one hand tied behind your back? It’s easy to get into inefficient browsing habits, but you might be surprised at what a little know-how about this everyday tool can do for your efficiency and happiness.

Take Control of Your Browser, by veteran tech writer Robyn Weisman, helps you discover your browser’s hidden talents, increase browsing speed, solve many common problems, and configure settings and extensions for maximum efficiency. If you’re troubled by ads, frustrated by ineffective searches, or confused by inscrutable error messages, this book will help you overcome your problems. Beginners will find lots of practical how-to advice, and even power users will learn tips and tricks for better browsing.

This book, like all Take Control titles, comes as an ebook, and you can download any combination of formats—PDF, EPUB, and/or Kindle’s Mobipocket format—so you can read it on pretty much any computer, smartphone, tablet, or ebook reader. The cover price is $14.99, but as an Interesting Thing of the Day reader, you can buy it this week for 30% off, or just $10.49.


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Author: Joe Kissell

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Cochlear Implants

Illustration of a cochlear implant

The sound and the fury

Today’s article was going to be a pretty straightforward technological exposition. I was going to describe a procedure that can improve hearing in ways that conventional hearing aids cannot, mention some of the limitations and risks involved, and pretty much leave it at that. Then I got an email from a friend wondering if I was planning to cover the political issues cochlear implants raise for the Deaf community. Um…political issues? I hadn’t known there were any. But after a bit of research, I discovered that the controversy surrounding this procedure is at least as interesting as the procedure itself, which has been called everything from a miracle cure to genocide.

Can You Hear Me Now?

First, a bit of background. There are many different types and causes of deafness. Some kinds of hearing loss can be compensated for very adequately with just a bit of amplification—namely, a hearing aid. However, if there is a defect or damage in the inner ear, a hearing aid may do no good. Our perception of sound results from the vibrations of tiny hairs lining the cochlea, a spiral, fluid-filled organ in the inner ear. When the hairs move, the hair cells convert the movement into nerve impulses, which are then sent to the brain for decoding. If the vibrations never reach the cochlea, or if the hair cells themselves are damaged, no neural stimulation occurs and deafness results.

However, if most of the underlying nerve fibers themselves (and the neural pathways to the brain) are intact, they can be stimulated electrically, producing a sensation interpreted by the brain as sound. A cochlear implant places a series of electrodes inside the cochlea to do just that; a wire connects these electrodes to a small receiver with its antenna placed under the skin. Outside the skin, a device that looks somewhat like a hearing aid picks up sounds with a microphone, digitizes them in such a way that they produce meaningful signals for the electrodes, and transmits them via radio waves to the receiver. The net result is the perception of sounds picked up by the microphone, but because this apparatus completely bypasses the eardrum and middle ear, it’s really an artificial ear rather than a hearing aid. The technology was developed by Dr. Graeme Clark at the University of Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s; the first implant was performed in 1978.

Although any number of technological innovations have occurred in the decades since, cochlear implants are still by no means perfect. They vary greatly in their effectiveness, depending on a large number of variables. And the effect they produce, while auditory in nature, is not identical to what would be experienced with a fully functional ear. In addition, patients with cochlear implants require months or years of training to associate their new perceptions with sounds as they are usually known. In the most successful cases, implant recipients can eventually understand someone talking on the phone—but there is no guarantee of that level of hearing. Still, tens of thousands of people around the world have received the implants, and the procedure is rapidly gaining in popularity.

You Will All Be Assimilated

To a hearing person such as myself, all this sounds very rosy and optimistic. Of course, the surgery is rather delicate and carries with it the usual risks associated with putting holes in one’s head; plus, the cost of the procedure and rehabilitative therapy is quite high. But these are not the primary concerns of the Deaf community. Although the controversy has diminished greatly in recent years, cochlear implants—particularly for children—were strongly opposed by many deaf people for some time because of a fear that they would destroy the Deaf culture in general and the use of sign language in particular.

On the surface, this argument may seem sort of silly to hearing persons. But the Deaf community has a unique culture and language that they rightly consider quite valuable; the thought of losing such a culture to technology is understandably offensive. One of the key beliefs of the Deaf community is that deafness is simply another perfectly valid way of life, not a problem that needs to be fixed. So the intimation that deafness is a “disease” for which cochlear implants are a “cure” smacks of assimilationism: “You must all be like us.” (The 2000 documentary film Sound and Fury examines the controversy over cochlear implants in detail as it follows members of two families through their decisions about whether or not to undergo the procedure.)

Even detractors of cochlear implants allow that this must be an individual decision, and that implants may be a reasonable choice for people who have lost hearing later in life (and who therefore may not have integrated themselves into the Deaf community). But when it comes to implants for children, the story is different. If a deaf child does not receive an implant, he or she is likely to learn sign language easily and adopt the Deaf culture. With an implant, the child is more likely to be treated as a hearing child. However, the imperfect nature of “hearing” provided by the implants may make it difficult to learn spoken English; meanwhile, because the parents have little incentive to raise the child as a deaf person, the child may never learn sign language. The result is that the child has less ability to communicate than if the implant had not been performed. In addition, if the child has partial hearing, the implant may eliminate any possibility of later using a conventional hearing aid by impeding normal functioning of the cochlea.

On the whole, decades of experience with cochlear implants in thousands of children have not borne out these worries, so resistance to implants in children is decreasing somewhat. Conventional wisdom holds that someone with a cochlear implant is still deaf, and many people with implants—children and adults alike—continue to learn and use sign language, participating actively in the Deaf culture. If cochlear implants, in a roundabout way, can promote both bilingualism and biculturalism, that may be their most compelling advantage.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on October 14, 2004.

Image credit: BruceBlaus [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons


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Author: Joe Kissell

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That Bagel Recipe, Morality, and Accreditation

Having been accused by some people of being immoral and unethical, I feel the need to defend myself.

As the author of a few published cookbooks who had recipes stolen and put in other published cookbooks without the slightest accreditation myself, I know just how awful that is. When I’ve created original content, figuring out some awesome things by myself and had my content literally copied


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Author: Penniless Parenting