Back from the Brink: “Psychological treatments for schizophrenia attract renewed
interest… Researchers are increasingly exploring ways to combine
psychological and social approaches with antipsychotic drugs, especially
in the early stages of the disorder. Techniques in the spotlight include
family-education sessions, job training, social rehabilitation, and several
forms of one-on-one psychotherapy.” Schizophrenia is a brain disorder we so far haven’t found a way to ‘cure.” But if we do, I’m convinced that it is not going to be through the ‘talking cure’, as psychotherapy has been called since the days of Freud, since which time clinicians have been valiantly attempting a gamut of therapeutic techniques with patients suffering from schizophrenia. The emphasis on medication treatment is not, as this article implies, because of physicians being bombarded with pharmaceutical company pressures to see things that way to support drug company profits, or because managed medical care discouraged complicated and time-consuming psychotherapeutic approaches. It began decades before the current generation of extremely costly ‘atypical’ antipsychotic medications, when we had dirt-cheap generic antipsychotics off patent protection because they had been around for decades; and it began a medical school generation before managed care was a blip on the horizon. It is simply because schizophrenia is a family of conditions in which basic brain functioning is awry in profound ways which cannot be corrected by reorganizing the personality structure and relatedness with insight, catharsis or the other magics that a therapy relationship works in ‘lesser’ conditions. Nevertheless, the art of creating a nonthreatening, supportive, thoughtful, safe treatment context with someone for whom all human interaction has become bewildering and terrifying had largely been lost somewhere along the way. It’s true that the baby had been thrown out with the bathwater and that psychiatrists-to-be can go through their entire training process without learning how to talk to such patients. If inddeed there’s a resurgence of interest in learning how to talk to the most psychiatrically ill patients, it can only be a good thing. Me? I’d never stopped… Science News

Salon.com offering porn to stay alive. “Trendy online rag Salon has addressed its steadily decreasing
relevance by embracing it fully.” The Register

Bovine Hormone Whistleblowers Honored: “On Monday, April 23 Jane
Akre and Steve Wilson —
two Tampa journalists who
took on the Fox television
network in a legal suit over
censorship of their
investigative report on the
safety of bovine growth
hormone — were named the
winners of the North
American part of the
prestigious 2001 Goldman
Environmental Prize.” Utne Reader

Adbusters: Fools Festival: “On April 1st 2001, legions of fools in ten
different countries descended on their local
malls and let money rain down on the heads of
the shell-shocked. The resulting pandemonium
was a boon to the foolish at heart and proved
that throwing money at the problem works –
when the problem is conformity!

Way to go fools!”

You Can Hide From Prying Eyes. Reports of the demise of online privacy have been exaggerated, it appears. Declan McCullagh reports from the recent fourth Information Hiding Workshop on some clever thinking about how to hide your online identity from those who have an interest in tracing your activities, Wired such as these people.

Inmates Do More Than Phone Home: “With the 1st Amendment as a shield and monitoring spotty, prisoners make
calls to arrange crimes that include murder.” LA Times

Google Restores Deja View. “The porn is back. The chronicles of many nasty flamewars are back, too. And everything you ever said
in Usenet, back before you had a real job or kids to worry about, has now returned to haunt you.

Popular Internet search site Google has made more than 500-million archived Usenet messages — an
archive dating back to 1995 — available online again.” Wired

Journalists Protest Gag Order: “The Electronic Frontier Foundation will represent a Seattle journalist collective that is
the target of a police probe and court-imposed gag order.

On Saturday evening, FBI agents visited the downtown offices of the Independent Media Center and
handed the group a court order — apparently related to the Quebec City trade summit — that also
instructed the media organization not to publish the contents of the order…

Still unclear is what the gag order says, or doesn’t say. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
reported on Tuesday that the FBI visit was connected to the online publishing of
security plans from the high-level trade summit held last weekend. Jill Freidberg, a Seattle IMC spokeswoman, said that “what was put out on the Seattle
P-I is filled with unfathomable inaccuracies” but, citing the gag order, refused to
provide details.” Wired

Arabs See Jewish Conspiracy in Pokemon. ‘Japanese embassies throughout the region have received inquiries from parents
and officials who had heard that Pokemon was Japanese for “I am a Jew.” ‘ LA Times

A columnist for the Worcester, Massachusetts Telegram & Gazette has angrily
quit his post after readers objected to a column — and his editor agreed.

James Dempsey’s April 20 column satirized Worcester residents’ fears of a
planned visit by Harley-Davidson enthusiasts by assigning similar concerns to
an upcoming convention of priests. “I see nothing but grief coming out of
this,” Dempsey wrote. “They’ll inspire the locals with their troublemaking
ways, and when they leave we’ll have the problem of swaggering,
cigarette-puffing altar boys to deal with.”

Readers offended by Dempsey’s column included Gazette editor Harry Whitin,
who published an apology calling the piece “mean-spirited, anti-Catholic and
crude.” Furious, Dempsey announced his decision to abandon the column and
return to the paper’s reporting staff.

“You don’t OK a column and then, because of some criticism, publicly
humiliate the columnist…” Dempsey fumed on Wednesday. “How is a columnist
to write provocatively, or indulge in satire or criticism, without wondering
whether the next day he or she will be excoriated in the newspaper and
characterized as a bungling fool?”

Readers discussed the flap in the newspaper’s message boards. [via Spike Report]

‘ “I joined the baboon troop during my twenty-first year. I had never planned
to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I
would become a mountain gorilla.” So begins Robert Sapolsky’s new book, A
Primate’s Memoir, about the time he spent in Kenya’s Serengeti over the
past twenty years, researching the stress levels of a troop of baboons.’

“For these baboons, stress is entirely socially generated, so they
really are good models for us. Study some marginal baboon population in
some dying ecosystem and it would not be anywhere near relevant to making
sense of which middle-aged executive gets heart disease. Our stress is
created by our privileged cocooning from ecological stressors; likewise
these baboons.”

An interview with Sapolsky, a professor of
biology and neurology at Stanford with wide-ranging interests and a MacArthur fellowship,
covers everything from the shadows
colonialism still casts on Africa, to the fallacy of free will, to why he
only rates as a “pathetically low-ranking baboon.”

Includes
excerpts from A Primate’s Memoir. The Atlantic

Planet ‘Survivor’: Astronomers Witness First Steps of Planet Growth – And Destruction. ‘Planet formation is a hazardous process. New pictures from the Hubble telescope are giving astronomers the first
direct visual evidence for the growth of planetary “building blocks” inside the dusty disks of young stars in the Orion
Nebula, a giant “star factory” near Earth. But these snapshots also reveal that the disks are being “blowtorched” by
a blistering flood of ultraviolet radiation from the region’s brightest star, making planet formation extremely difficult.’

Acne: No Longer Just a Market for Teenagers. Adult women, even those who describe themselves as having had perfect skin in their adolescence, are increasingly seeking cosmetic and medical treatments for acne. Some dermatological experts say adult acne truly is on the rise in women, and point to the hormonal consequences of increased stress in modern life. Critics think it is simply a matter of women being more worried about blemishes than they used to be, a fact exploited — or perhaps created — by pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies aggressively attempting to expand their marketing territory. New York Times

The Outsider: Taking Flight, Tension-Free “Almost exactly 100 years ago, a couple of guys from Dayton, Ohio, went
down to Kitty Hawk, took the strings off their kites and ruined the whole thing.” New York Times

Who Built the H-Bomb? Debate Revives thanks to a tape-recorded memoir by conservative hero Dr. Edward Teller, disparaging scientific rivals as he faces death. New York Times

Science’s Elusive Realm: Life’s Little Mysteries. The new Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) at Los Alamos studies what prominent scientists calls the ‘mesoscale,’ between the realm of molecules describable in quantum mechanical terms and the realm of the cell where well-described biological theory holds sway. Difficult to investigate, it is the level on which cell constituents interact with one another and the elucidation of its organizing principles and deeper theory will help us “to understand and maybe even design matter that organizes itself into living systems… To start with, ICAM researchers are focusing on one beguiling fact: complex
systems can arise out of simple constituents that interact with each other in ways
not necessarily obvious”, looking at, for example, the mystery of protein folding.

” ‘We are letting nature tell us what it likes to do.’ … Such experiments have
extraordinary implications… Unlike vitalism — a doctrine that says
the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry
alone and that life is in some way self-determining — the research into complex
adaptive matter says that life is the consequence of molecular interactions.

‘If we can discover organizing principles in biology other than evolution, it means
we will be able to make living systems in the laboratory. We
can understand how life began.’ ” New York Times