Monthly Archives: November 2007

Progress can kill

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Survival International is a worthy charity I support, which works to help indigenous peoples protect their land rights. Here is their report, Progress Can Kill. A press release highlights one horrendous pull-out fact, the dramatic spread of HIV/AIDS among tribal peoples from increased contact with ‘modernity.’

Red, White, and Bleu

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“Is it possible that meat is now openly enjoying a renaissance —that it’s finally cool to be a carnivore? If so, it has been a long time coming. Meat-eaters, having already ceded the moral ground to vegetarians (no one has ever really come up with a persuasive rejoinder to the claim that a warm-blooded, pain-feeling creature’s life shouldn’t be taken for your supper), have more recently had to accept that their diet is probably the source of much of the world’s heart disease and much of its obesity. That diet is also sustained by an industry that is just flat-out evil: the factory farms, the egregious economies of waste in fast food, the ghastly genetic manipulations of chickens and turkeys, the pigs raised in no-room-to-move confinement, the reckless use of antibiotics and growth hormones (as well as the frightful possible consequences—early breasting in children, difficult-to-defeat superbugs), the contamination of fields and rivers by noxious excrement runoffs from feedlots the size of small nations, the tricks and shortcuts adopted by supermarkets (cheap animals fattened on cheap grain, butchered by high-pressure hose, and packaged at their bloated maximum weight). And yet, at a time when things could not seem worse, there is a generation of people (in their forties or younger) who are thinking hard and philosophically about their food and are prepared to declare: Enough! I’m a meat-eater and proud of it! Three books by authors from three backgrounds—a farmer, a chef, and a pig-slaughtering, bacon-loving descendant of butchers—are remarkably alike in their gleeful chauvinism about being carnivores.” — Bill Buford (New Yorker)
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Never Mind Grendel…

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…Can Beowulf Conquer the 21st-Century Guilt Trip? “Much has been written about how Beowulf looks, but less about what it means, partly because that meaning is difficult to articulate. We live in an age of radically different values than those of the original Beowulf culture, yet it still speaks to us. Many of its explicit statements of power, violence, and gender relations are forbidden to our more gentle, egalitarian, and diplomatic society. But something in the primitive story resonates deeply in the modern audience as well — embarrassingly so (or ironically so) for intellectuals, but more sincerely I suspect for lay audiences.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

State Quarters Near End of Popular Run

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“But the series may get an extra breath of life. A bill to issue six more coins in 2009, honoring the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the United States Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands has been approved by the House of Representatives and is now awaiting action in the Senate banking committee.” (New York Times )

And here’s the part I find hard to believe:

“…Surveys by the Mint have found that nearly half of all Americans collect the state quarters, either in casual accumulations or as a serious numismatic pursuit. A total of 31.2 billion quarters with the various statehood designs were made through the end of 2006, he said. That is about 20 billion more than would have been made normally, he said, and the surplus translates to a government profit, or seigniorage, of $3.8 billion as a result of collectors’ taking the state quarters out of circulation.”

I guess it depends on what your definition of ‘collect’ is.

Research sheds light on why some people can’t handle success

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Self-defeating: “New research shows that how people view their abilities in the workplace impacts how they respond to success. …[T]hose who thought of their capabilities as fixed were more likely to become anxious and disoriented when faced with dramatic success, causing their subsequent performance to plummet, compared to those who thought of their abilities as changeable.” (PhysOrg)

In Quest of the Doomsday Yawn

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The Perfect Yawn: “Provine, who has spent 20 years studying laughter and is the author of a well-respected book about why we laugh, is an expert on contagious behaviors. He decided (since he has tenure, and why not?) to try to design a yawn so powerful that it would make everyone who saw it yawn back. That was his goal: the 100 percent contagious yawn.” — Robert Krulwich (NPR)via rebecca

The end of homeopathy?

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“Time after time, properly conducted scientific studies have proved that homeopathic remedies work no better than simple placebos. So why do so many sensible people swear by them? And why do homeopaths believe they are victims of a smear campaign?…

There are some aspects of quackery that are harmless – childish even – and there are some that are very serious indeed. On Tuesday, to my great delight, the author Jeanette Winterson launched a scientific defence of homeopathy in these pages. She used words such as “nano” meaninglessly, she suggested that there is a role for homeopathy in the treatment of HIV in Africa, and she said that an article in the Lancet today will call on doctors to tell their patients that homeopathic “medicines” offer no benefit.

The article does not say that, and I should know, because I wrote it. It is not an act of fusty authority, and I claim none: I look about 12, and I’m only a few years out of medical school. This is all good fun, but my adamant stance, that I absolutely lack any authority, is key: because this is not about one man’s opinion, and there is nothing even slightly technical or complicated about the evidence on homeopathy, or indeed anything, when it is clearly explained.” — Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)

The end of homeopathy?

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“Time after time, properly conducted scientific studies have proved that homeopathic remedies work no better than simple placebos. So why do so many sensible people swear by them? And why do homeopaths believe they are victims of a smear campaign?…

There are some aspects of quackery that are harmless – childish even – and there are some that are very serious indeed. On Tuesday, to my great delight, the author Jeanette Winterson launched a scientific defence of homeopathy in these pages. She used words such as “nano” meaninglessly, she suggested that there is a role for homeopathy in the treatment of HIV in Africa, and she said that an article in the Lancet today will call on doctors to tell their patients that homeopathic “medicines” offer no benefit.

The article does not say that, and I should know, because I wrote it. It is not an act of fusty authority, and I claim none: I look about 12, and I’m only a few years out of medical school. This is all good fun, but my adamant stance, that I absolutely lack any authority, is key: because this is not about one man’s opinion, and there is nothing even slightly technical or complicated about the evidence on homeopathy, or indeed anything, when it is clearly explained.” — Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)

Ability to read others’ emotions can withstand memory loss, study suggests

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“Toronto researchers are challenging a longstanding belief about the mind and, in the process, suggesting there is additional hope for people who have lost many of their personal memories after a devastating brain injury. The researchers have concluded that people with such memory loss can still read other people’s feelings and intentions — they can still detect sarcasm or deception, for example — abilities necessary for social relationships.

“It’s encouraging to know that this ability may be more resilient and preserved in us than was first thought,” neuropsychologist Shayna Rosenbaum of the Baycrest Centre’s Rotman Research Institute said in a release Thursday.

The scientists, from the Baycrest institute and York University, tested the assumption that humans rely on their personal recollections, called episodic memory, to make sense of other people’s behaviour. This “theory of mind” is widely accepted in scientific circles.” (CBC)

Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything?

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‘Garrett Lisi is an unlikely individual to be staking a claim for a theory of everything. He has no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii. In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, California, to teach snowboarding. Until recently, physics was not much more than a hobby.

That hasn’t stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print archive this week. By analysing the most elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered a relationship underlying all the universe’s particles and forces, including gravity – or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.’ (New Scientist thanks to abby)

And:

A shape could describe the cosmos and all it contains

More about Lisi’s work from The Economist.

Race,genes, and intelligence

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William Saletan: “Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there’s strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It’s time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true. If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you’re not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn’t just another fact; it’s a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating ‘supposedly superior intellects,’ ‘eliminating the weak,’ ‘paralyzing the hope of reform,’ jeopardizing ‘the doctrine of brotherhood,’ and undermining ‘the sympathetic activities of a civilized society.’ The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals…” (Slate)

In Some Households, Every Day Is Turkey Day

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Not like adopting a kitten or a puppy: “It is one thing for the president of the United States to pardon a pair of turkeys every year and then send them off to live out their days in Florida. It’s quite another to save a turkey from the Thanksgiving table by inviting it to live with you. Two weeks ago, Karen Oeh and her husband, Mike Balistreri, who live not far from Santa Cruz, Calif., adopted two turkeys that had been rescued after an airline shipping misfortune in Las Vegas. “I am like a new parent,” said Ms. Oeh, 39. “I instantly, totally fell in love, and now I just want to stay home with them.” Ms. Oeh and Mr. Balistreri will not be among the 92 percent of Americans who will eat turkey today, as estimated by the National Turkey Federation, a trade group. Instead, they have given the birds a softer, easier path that bypasses the oven and leads to the backyard.” (New York Times )

Layered Time

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“This is an extreme closeup scan (2400 dpi) of a paint chip retrieved from the ruins of Belmont Art Park by Amy McKenzie earlier this year. The fragment is about 1cm thick, and appears to consist of about 150-200 layers of paint. (For a sense of scale, note the ridges of my fingerprint in the lower right.) This should give you an idea of the staggering number of pieces painted in this spot over the decades.” [via Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream] //theworld.com/~emg/paintchip.jpg' cannot be displayed]

Exploring the Ethics of Contested Surgeries

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Metapsychology review: “Cutting to the Core, edited by David Benatar, deals with ethical issues surrounding some of the most controversial surgeries in practice. Discussed are male circumcision and female genital cutting, sex assignment and reassignment, conjoined twin separation, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery. The book is organized into six parts, each corresponding to one of these topics. As the editor mentions in his introduction, the aim of this collection was not to present an article for each side of the subjects (i.e., one ‘for’ and one ‘against’). Rather, the goal was to highlight the ethical issues involved with these surgeries by offering the reader various views of and approaches to these issues. Even when the authors’ conclusions agree, their approaches might not… ” It sounds like an interesting book, but I am surprised that it does not appear to include anything about surgical amputation for patients with apotemnophilia, about which I have written several times in FmH.

Talking Back to Prozac

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The New York Review of Books on three new books; the titles tell it all: The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield; Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane; and Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression by David Healy. Essayist Frederick Crewes concludes that we have here

“some uncomfortable insights about American psychiatry and its role within a far from rational health care system. That system is too cumbersome and too driven by profit considerations to meet the whole society’s medical needs; but citizens possessing full insurance, when they feel mentally troubled in any way, won’t be denied medication or therapy or both. Nothing more is required than some hypocrisy all around. As for psychiatry’s inability to settle on a discrete list of disorders that can remain impervious to fads and fashions, that is an embarrassment only to clear academic thinkers like these two authors. For bureaucratized psychological treatment, and for the pharmaceutical industry that is now deeply enmeshed in it, confusion has its uses and is likely to persist.”

Oil Officials See Limit Looming on Production

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“The world certainly won’t run out of oil any time soon. And plenty of energy experts expect sky-high prices to hasten the development of alternative fuels and improve energy efficiency. But evidence is mounting that crude-oil production may plateau before those innovations arrive on a large scale. That could set the stage for a period marked by energy shortages, high prices and bare-knuckled competition for fuel.” (WSJ)

Meet Me, Myself And I

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The Concept of the Google-Ganger, that other person with your name you or others discover when your name is googled. (Newsweek).

‘Gelwan’ is a very rare surname and every Google reference to ‘Eliot Gelwan’ relates to this one. My grandfather and his sisters emigrated to the US early in the 20th century; my father and one childless brother were born in New York, so the only Gelwans closely related to me are my brother and my children (my wife keeps her own name).

I’ve discovered several other “Gelwans’ through Google. Perhaps uncannily, three others, all in the New York area, (a husband, wife, and brother) are physicians, like myself. I have been in e-contact with them and we cannot figure out any way in which we might be related. Probably we represent a case of convergent evolution — different names from Eastern Europe identically anglicized at Ellis Island.

There is also a Vladimir Gelwan, who used to be the principal dancer with the Latvian National Ballet and now has a ballet school in Berlin. I suspect he and I might be related, since my paternal ancestors are known to have come from Riga. And then there are the Brazilian and Lebanese Gelwans, as discovered by googling. I have written to Berlin, to Brazil and to Beirut, but have not gotten replies.

My father once told me that a Gelwan had once knocked on our door in New York when I was a young child, having come from Brazil and discovered us in a New York City phone book.

Since we have such an attenuated family, my perennial search for Gelwans online is I think motivated by a yearning for family connectivity — especially for my children’s sake — as much as the usual ego-driven pleasures of googling one’s name. Ah, well, for better or worse a fate you with more common names, or those where more geneological precision is possible, will never experience…

Not A River in Egypt…

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Denial Makes the World Go Round: “…[R]ecent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.” (New York Times)

Beowulf vs. The Lord of the Rings

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Living Universe vs. 3D Voyage to Schlockville: “Robert Zemeckis’ new film Beowulf gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘the sublime and the ridiculous.’ Zemeckis took the oldest and most important text of our ur-language, and turned it into a 3-D Disneyland ride so cheesy he should have called it Anglo-Saxons of the Caribbean. Of course, there’s nothing new or surprising about this. Hollywood has been profaning history and literature since long before Cecil B. DeMille cast Charlton Heston as Moses. If the Bible isn’t sacred, why should the oldest poem in our ancestral language be? But the Beowulf travesty is especially glaring, because of the obvious contrast with another work that mined the same ancient field: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. ” — Gary Kamiya (Salon)

Clowns Interrupt CIA Recruitment at UCSB

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Students Protest CIA’s Torture Tactics: “…[A] group of protesters interrupted the recruiter’s PowerPoint presentation by placing one of their fellow clowns on the front table, binding his hands and arms, and pouring water on his face to simulate waterboarding torture in front of the presentation’s unsuspecting audience. The group also held a mock press conference citing historical torture statistics and played limbo with a fuzzy green boa before the recruiters quickly packed up their equipment and left the room.” (Daily Nexus)

The Biggest Lie Told To The American People

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Ahmadinejad’s Alleged Remarks On Israel: “As someone who was born in Tehran, lived there for seventeen years and is a native Farsi speaker, I have read the original transcripts of the speech in Farsi and want to inform you that Ahmadinejad never said ‘Israel must be wiped off the map,’ but rather, his statement was grossly mistranslated and taken out of context, perhaps to help make a case for military action against Iran.” – Sam Sedaei Huffington Post)

Memory

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Remember This: “There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as ‘AJ,’ who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called ‘EP,’ who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.” (National Geographic Magazine)

Why I and O are dull for synaesthetes

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From New Scientist: “David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine in Texas has looked at more than 1000 synaesthetes who see colours when viewing some letters and numbers. He found that frequently used letters are most likely to evoke colours, while letters such as Q and X are less likely to do so. However, Eagleman spotted two frequently used letters that bucked this trend: I and O. He also noticed that the numbers 1 and 0 are often not coloured. Eagleman thinks this may be because these characters are made up from natural shapes that we learn to recognise before mastering the alphabet or learning to …”

Think you’re helping the environment by recycling that old computer?

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Destination of ‘recycled’ electronics may surprise you: “While there are no precise figures, activists estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the 300,000 to 400,000 tons of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. each year ends up overseas. Workers in countries such as China, India and Nigeria then use hammers, gas burners and their bare hands to extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and the environment to a cocktail of toxic chemicals.” (CNN)

Is Dirtiness Next to Healthiness?

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This CBC opinion piece by Stephen Strauss calls for more systematic research on the hygiene hypothesis, the idea that we live in too clean a world to be good for our immune systems. The results may include the epidemic of asthma, eczema, allergies and perhaps even some autoimmune disorders like juvenile diabetes.

On the other hand, Times of London columnist Melanie Reid laments the increasing incidence of the potentially fatal bug E. Coli 0157 throughout the environment and its implication that we can no longer let our children drink free-running water from our mountain streams.

“There is now a move to raise public awareness about the increasing incidence of the bug in the natural environment. And this is where it gets controversial; for it is all about balance of risk. And scientists have to convince us that this is not just another manifestation of the nanny state, possessed of a burning desire to overregulate.

What they’re trying to formulate at the moment is what controls to put on animals, and how to inform walkers, campers, farmers; and people who live in rural communities with private water supplies. It looks like being a predictable litany: get your private water supply checked; wash your hands after handling animals; carry hand wipes; use bottled water; don’t drink from streams; don’t picnic or camp where animals are grazing; don’t get too muddy.

One scientist even used the analogy of traffic to convince those who resist the advice. In the 1920s you could walk across the road without looking right or left. Would you do that today?

The argument – that improvements in hygiene, not medicine, made the world safer – is a persuasive one, but it’s also terribly sad. There’s something desperately mournful about being told that the countryside, the wellspring of us all, is now a threat. It feels like the severing of some important connection, because in a funny way, the countryside has come to represent the lost land of the free: the last place where you can find an illusion of escape.

There’s an irony, too, in that the rush to the great outdoors has never been greater.”

Beyond cute and cuddly

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“How is this for a new conservation mantra? Eat the panda. Let the tiger die out. And let’s admit that species such as the condor have had their day and let them quietly fade away instead of spending limited conservation resources trying to keep them alive. That is heresy to traditional conservationists but it is a view being propounded by activists calling for a radical rethink of priorities, especially as climate change threatens to accelerate the number of extinctions in the next few decades.” (The Australian)

People who skip meals:

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Are they better off?: “Foregoing food for a day each month stood out among other religious practices in members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS or Mormons), who have lower rates of heart disease than other Americans, researchers reported at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2007. “People who fast seem to receive a heart-protective benefit, and this appeared to also hold true in non-LDS people who fast as part of a health-conscious lifestyle,” said Benjamin D. Horne, Ph.D., M.P.H., study author and director of cardiovascular and genetic epidemiology at Intermountain Medical Center and adjunct assistant professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. In the 1970s, scientists recognized that Latter-Day Saints (LDS) in Utah are less likely to die of heart disease than other Utah residents and Americans overall. The religious prohibition against tobacco use is usually credited for the health benefit, but researchers wondered whether other religious teachings also may be important(.” )Eurekalert

Waiting for Good Joe

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Do coffee shops discriminate against women?: “My female colleagues don’t go to coffee shops because they’re shabbily treated when they get there. That’s the conclusion of American economist Caitlin Knowles Myers. She, with her students as research assistants, staked out eight coffee shops (PDF) in the Boston area and watched how long it took men and women to be served. Her conclusion: Men get their coffee 20 seconds earlier than do women. (There is also evidence that blacks wait longer than whites, the young wait longer than the old, and the ugly wait longer than the beautiful. But these effects are statistically not as persuasive.)” — Tim Harford (Slate)

Related:

Starbucks Gossip

Jim Romenesko, of Obscure Store fame, keeps a weblog about “America’s favorite drug dealer.”

African Crucible:

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Cast as Witches, Then Cast Out: “In parts of Angola, Congo and the Congo Republic, a surprising number of children are accused of being witches, and then are beaten, abused or abandoned. Child advocates estimate that thousands of children living in the streets of Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, have been accused of witchcraft and cast out by their families, often as a rationale for not having to feed or care for them.” (New York Times )

What Makes a Terrorist

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Alan Krueger, who teaches economics and public policy at Princeton and has been an adviser to the National Counterterrorism Center, feels economists ought to have something to say about the matter. Although it seems plausible that those who have little turn their frustrations on others, empirical evidence is clear that it is not the have-nots or the uneducated who become terrorists, but the better-educated and more advantaged. In fact, the author writes, it makes little sense to look at the supply side for explanations or, for that matter, for interventions. People are motivated to join extremist causes for a variety of reasons. Correcting or countering one will leave diverse others.

That suggests to me that it makes sense to focus on the demand side, such as by degrading terrorist organizations’ financial and technical capabili­ties, and by vigorously protecting and promoting peaceful means of protest, so there is less demand for pursuing grievances through violent means. Policies intended to dampen the flow of people willing to join terrorist organizations, by contrast, strike me as less likely to succeed.

The evidence we have seen thus far does not foreclose the possibility that members of the elite become terrorists because they are outraged by the economic conditions of their countrymen. This is a more difficult hypothesis to test, but, it turns out, there is little empirical sup­port for it.

Not only do terrorists not arise from the poorer segments of societies, but they do not tend to come from the poorest countries. The sociopolitical factors that correlate most with the creation of terorists turn out to be suppression of civil liberties and individual freedoms. Even international terrorists appear to be motivated by local concerns. In short (and it sounds obvious when stated in this way):

The evidence suggests that terrorists care about influencing political outcomes. They are often motivated by geopolitical grievances. To under­stand who joins terrorist organizations, instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose an extrem­ist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead, they are people who care so fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.

(The American)

‘Reductio ad Absurdum’ Dept.

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Depression Study Suggests Model for Neurological Basis of Psychotherapy: ‘A new study has provided preliminary evidence that similar neurobiological mechanisms underlie psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy. The study found an association between genotypic variation in 2 receptors associated with antidepressant response and patients’ responses to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Specific polymorphisms of HTR2A (a serotonin receptor) and NTRK2 (a receptor for brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF), as well as their interactions, appear to predict the effectiveness of CBT in patients with unipolar depression.’ (Medscape)

Oh man, is this an unwarranted stretch if I have ever heard one. The fact that a genotypic variation which correlates with antidepressant responsiveness also correlates with responsiveness to a type of talk therapy for depression carries next to no implication that that mechanisms at that receptor underlie the neurobiological response to therapy! I hope it is easy to see that this is an exemplar of the classical fallacy of taking correlation for causation. Through the years, there have been a spate of speculative papers attempting to reduce psychotherapy response to a neurobiological mechanism. Well, duh, all mental events operate via neurons and neurochemicals, right? Surely ‘reduce’, as in reductionism, is the operative word in these attempts.

NerdArt

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Kevin Kelly writes: “More than once, the nerdy Icelandic/Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has donated 3 tons of white lego bricks to a community and had their kids construct cityscapes. The resulting art is beautiful. I much prefer fantasy constructions with Lego, to any reproduction of an existing thing, which most Lego building seems to be about. These community built cities have all the glory of community built cities in real life.” (KK Lifestream )
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Why blame me? It was all my brain’s fault

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The dubious rise of ‘neurolaw’: “The legal profession in America is taking an increasing interest in neuroscience. There is a flourishing academic discipline of “neurolaw” and neurolawyers are penetrating the legal system. Vanderbilt University recently opened a $27 million neuroimaging centre and hopes to enrol students in a programme in the law and neuroscience. In the courts, as in the trial of serial rapist and murderer Bobby Joe Long, brain-scan evidence is being invoked in support of pleas of diminished responsibility. The idea is abroad that developments in neuroscience – in particular the observation of activity in the living brain, using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging – have shown us that we are not as free, or as accountable for our actions, as we traditionally thought.” (Times.UK)

How to Fight Childhood Blindness

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“By embracing genetically modified ‘golden rice,’ says Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, the world can help millions of people in developing countries: …’I am often asked why I broke ranks with Greenpeace after co-founding the group in 1971 and then spending 15 years in its leadership as a full-time environmental activist. One of the main reasons was that by the mid-1980s the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of scare tactics and sensationalism.'” (The American)

Poe’s Mysterious Death:

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The Plot Thickens! “There are numerous competing theories about Mr. Poe’s death—the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, even has an exhibit dedicated to all of them. Some Poe experts believe it was the result of drink. Others think he had rabies. A few argue he was poisoned by corrupt political operatives. But [Matthew] Pearl—a 32-year-old graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, whose 2003 debut, the international best seller The Dante Club, prompted Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown to declare him, “the new star of literary fiction”—told The Observer recently that he has unearthed new information that suggests a less sensational answer: ” (The New York Observer)

Who Needs Classical Music?

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Books: The Musical Mystique: “Last January, Gene Weingarten, a Washington Post columnist, persuaded the violinist Joshua Bell to join him in an experiment. Bell was to dress in jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, position himself at the head of the escalator in the L’Enfant Plaza subway station at the height of the morning rush hour, open his violin case, take out his $3.5 million Stradivarius, launch into Bach’s D-minor Chaconne for solo violin, and see what happened.” (The New Republic)

Botox for the brain?

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Brain-boosting drugs spark ethical debate: ‘A rise in healthy people popping pills to boost performance in exams or work, raises long-term ethical and safety concerns about the effects of such treatments, British doctors said on Thursday…

The ability of prescription drugs and medical procedures to improve intellectual performance is likely to increase significantly in the next 20 to 30 years as technology advances.

“We know that there is likely to be a demand by healthy individuals for this treatment,” Dr Tony Calland, chairman of the BMA’s Medical Ethics Committee said at the launch of a discussion paper on the issue. “However, given that no drug or invasive medical procedure is risk free, is it ethical to make them available to people who are not ill?”

Surreptitious use of brain-boosting prescription drugs is particularly common in the United States and likely to increase in Britain, the BMA said…

Today, the use of pharmaceutical aids to boost performance is mainly confined to certain groups — notably students cramming for exams.Popular choices include drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, such as Ritalin, or methylphenidate, made by Novartis AG and others.Another favorite is modafinil, the active ingredient in Cephalon Inc’s narcolepsy medicine Provigil…’ (Scientific American)

The fallacy in this concern is that we can ever effectively decide whether a given person is ill or just well and cheating. The boundaries of illness are social constructions dependent on cultural norms. It is easy to point to the enormous influence of the profit-driven pharmaceutical industry but I think our collective mental ecology is being betrayed by psychiatrists and other metal health professionals who should be smart enough to know better. Pharmacological determinism has gone fist in glove with medicalizing and pathologizing personality traits and normal human variability.

Happier Facing Death?

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‘Here’s one for the annals of counterintuitive findings: When asked to contemplate the occasion of their own demise, people become happier than usual, instead of sadder, according to a new study in the November issue of Psychological Science. Researchers say it’s a kind of psychological immune response — faced with thoughts of our own death, our brains automatically cope with the conscious feelings of distress by nonconsciously seeking out and triggering happy feelings, a mechanism that scientists theorize helps protect us from permanent depression or paralyzing despair.

It might explain the shift toward more positive emotions and thought processes as people age and approach death, and the preternaturally positive outlook that some terminally ill patients seem to muster. Though it looks a lot like old-fashioned denial, that’s not the case, says lead author Nathan DeWall. It’s not that “‘I know I’m going to die, but I just con myself into thinking I’m not.’ I don’t think that’s what’s going on here,” says DeWall. “I think what’s happening is that people are really unaware of [their own resilience]…”‘ (Time)

For Those Who Wondered What She’s Up to Next

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“J.K. Rowling has completed her first book after her wildly popular series on teen wizard Harry Potter – an illustrated collection of magical fairy stories titled ‘The Tales of Beedle the Bard.’ Only seven copies of the handwritten book have been made, Rowling said Thursday. One will be auctioned next month to raise money for a children’s charity, while the others have been given away as gifts.” (Wired)

Which Advertiser Is on Your Friend List?

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“Esther Dyson… asked a great question at the Behavioral Advertising Town Hall today in Washington. As quoted by MediaPost, Ms. Dyson wondered whether the way people are controlling information on social networks shouldn’t also apply to advertising: “If I curate my profile… and if I can decide which of my friends can see which part of my profile, why can’t I do that for marketers?”” (New York Times)

Prostates and Prejudices

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Paul Krugman: ‘“My chance of surviving prostate cancer — and thank God I was cured of it — in the United States? Eighty-two percent,” says Rudy Giuliani in a new radio ad attacking Democratic plans for universal health care. “My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent, under socialized medicine.”

It would be a stunning comparison if it were true. But it isn’t. And thereby hangs a tale — one of scare tactics, of the character of a man who would be president and, I’m sorry to say, about what’s wrong with political news coverage.

Let’s start with the facts: Mr. Giuliani’s claim is wrong on multiple levels — bogus numbers wrapped in an invalid comparison embedded in a smear. ‘ (New York Times op-ed)

Related?

Beyond Those Health Care Numbers

N. Gregory Mankiw: ‘With the health care system at the center of the political debate, a lot of scary claims are being thrown around. The dangerous ones are not those that are false; watchdogs in the news media are quick to debunk them. Rather, the dangerous ones are those that are true but don’t mean what people think they mean.

Here are three of the true but misleading statements about health care that politicians and pundits love to use to frighten the public…’ (New York Times op-ed)

Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard. He was an adviser to President Bush and is advising Mitt Romney in the current presidential campaign.

Noun Verb 9/11 Iran = Democrats’ Defeat?

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Frank Rich: “…what happens if President Bush does not bomb Iran? That is good news for the world, but potentially terrible news for the Democrats. If we do go to war in Iran, the election will indeed be a referendum on the results, which the Republican Party will own no matter whom it nominates for president. But if we don’t, the Democratic standard-bearer will have to take a clear stand on the defining issue of the race. As we saw once again at Tuesday night’s debate, the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, does not have one.” (New York Times op-ed)

Biden: Rudy’s Sentences Consist Of "A Noun, A Verb, And 9/11"

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Noted on The Huffington Post: “‘And the irony is, Rudy Giuliani, probably the most underqualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency, is here talking about any of the people here. Rudy Giuliani… I mean, think about it! Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else! And I mean this sincerely. He’s genuinely not qualified to be president.'”