Did dreaming evolve because rehearsal confers an evolutionary advantage? (Human Nature Review)

“The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) could be taking the wrong approach. Instead of listening for alien radio broadcasts, a better strategy may be to look for giant structures placed in orbit around nearby stars by alien civilisations.

‘Artificial structures may be the best way for an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation to signal its presence to an emerging technology like ours,’ says Luc Arnold of the Observatory of Haute-Provence in France. And he believes that the generation of space-based telescopes now being designed will be able to spot them.” (New Scientist)

Arnold does not make a compelling case, to my way of thinking, about why a civilization would go to the trouble (oops! it might be no trouble for them…) of doing this rather than merely broadcasting their presence. His argument seems to arise from nothing so much as that our telescopes have recently gotten powerful enough to spot a planet-sized object transiting a star.

Book Review: Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist. Edited by John Brockman. xii 236 pp. Pantheon Books, 2004. $23.95.

Psychiatrist Peter Kramer is very tired of one objection raised to his notorious 1993 book, Listening to Prozac. Kramer had raised concerns that Prozac and the other SSRIs would usher in an era of ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, modifying personality traits in people who had never experienced a frank mood disorder. The book considered the ethical and policy implications and wondered how physicians should prescribe such drugs. (I have always agreed with Kramer’s concerns and both of have practiced long enough to see his worst fears come to pass, IMHO.) Kramer reflects on the question one variant of which was almost invariably asked when he gave talks on the themes of Listening to Prozac. “What if Prozac had been available in van Gogh’s time?” Especially in light of the compelling evidence of the last decade that depression is a progressive disorder and a neurodegenerative one which destroys nerve pathways as well as damaging the cardiovascular and endocrine systems, Kramer is compelled to remind us that the tortured artist’s genius must be envisioned to be despite rather than because of his/her mental illness. “Beset by great evil, a person can be wise, observant and disillusioned and yet not depressed. Resilience confers its own measure of insight. We should have no trouble admiring what we do admire — depth, complexity, aesthetic brilliance — and standing foursquare against depression.” (New York Times Magazine)

Who needs broadband when you have got the new American Taliban theocracy?

‘At this point,’ he says, ‘I’m a mass murderer.’ (Baltimore Sun)

If you ever need to write files to PDF format, you don’t need to pay for the exorbitant Adobe Acrobat.

Levitt has a weblog too.

“Researchers Find That Chocolate Compound Stops Cancer Cell Cycle in Lab Experiments”

I am not exactly sure why this should surprise us.

The researchers’ assumption has been that the personality attributes are early manifestations of the brain changes (essentially, loss of dopaminergic neurons in deep brain areas) in the Parkinson’s disease process. But it also seems possible to me that decades of anxious pessimism can help bring about that neuronal loss and ssentially cause Parkinson’s Disease. The more we look in psychiatry and neuroscience, the more we find that there is a reciprocal, not just a one-way, relationship between brain changes and behavior changes. So… don’t worry. Literally, don’t.

I have written before here about the sousveillance movement, literally ‘watching from below’, the opposite of surveillance. Actually, the more interesting discussion in this article is on implementations of Michel Foucault’s notion that surveillance is not as much an action as a concept, that behavior is altered not by being watched but by the idea that one may be being watched. Many of the smoked plastic domes in stores that savvy consumers assume contain surveillance cameras may be empty. And of course many of the monitors displaying what the cameras scrutinize are unmanned.

Along these lines, I wish more earthlings realized that everything we do is being scrutinized by the aliens. On the other hand, one version of that concept, the fundamentalists’ version, that God is watching each of you all the time and knows everything you do, say or think, seems significantly accepted, and a heck of a lot of good that has done.

“Montage-a-google is a simple web-based app that uses Google’s image search to generate a large gridded montage of images based on keywords (search terms) entered by the user. Not only an interesting way of browsing the net, it can also be used to create desktop pictures or even posters (see examples below – more coming soon).”

Remember the recent Postcards from Buster flap? Now, in what certainly appears to be a continuing trend toward Republican appeasement, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has removed president and CEO Kathleen Cox after nine months in office. Her interim replacement is the former FCC chief operating officer “whose primary legacy is his longtime lobbying to relax the rules regulating corporate media expansion.” (Salon)

Unlike a Google search on the phrase “follow me here”, my PubSub feed, which delivers to me weblog references to “Gelwan” or “Follow Me Here”, has very little referring to my writing these days. It is mostly full of links to folks who are saying “now follow me here…” as they spin out some tortuous logic or questionable argument. Should I have copyrighted the phrase?

While we are on the topic of the writer’s perennial preoccupation with how much atttention s/he is attracting, there are many many more comments being entered on my posts here these days. I am not sure why that is, but I am loving it. Keep it up! (It seems it is a function of the efforts of just a few faithful and loquacious readers. What about the rest of you?)

California Moves to Ban Alcohol Inhalation Devices. This probably belongs in the ‘What-Will-They-Think-Of-Next’ Dept., or is it the ‘Hell-in-a-Handbasket’ Dept. (to which I seem to be increasingly resorting recently)? (CNS News)

This Virginia anaesthesiologist/weblogger writes:

Guilty. The Rabid Right may have lost the court battles on Terry Schiavo, but they have just begun to fight against judges whose decisions offend their sensibilities. And don’t underestimate what they can do. (Washington Post)

Columbia University political scientist Kenneth Waltz thinks nuclear proliferation can make us safer. Nonproliferation made sense in a world dominated by the balance of terror between two superpowers, but now in a unipolar world, a nuclear deterrent in the hands of smaller nations can disrupt the destabilizing ambitions of a reckless arrogant superpower. (Boston Globe)

Is this a new version of the slaveowners’ argument that their slaves should be grateful for how well they treated them, rather than simply agitating for their freedom?

Why is being ill now embraced as a positive part of the human experience? Frank Furedi:

Furedi, an English sociologist, discusses medicalization, the ‘normalization of illness’ (we are all seen now as being potentially ill), the growing use of the language of illness and health to make sense of increasingly ambiguous human experience, and the politicization of health (politicians’ growing preoccupation with healthcare and the healthcare crisis, which I think stems largely from the growing political power of the pharmaceutical industry and its stranglehold over healthcare). His summary theme is the interesting, and telling, point (with which I agree) that the normalization of illness is a cultural fact. Proeccupation with health, and the fact that more and more of us are thinking of ourselves as sick, sicker, and sicker for longer, is the real source of the healthcare crisis, and it is not going to be solved in the public policy sphere.

“Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?” (MSNBC/Newsweek) Steven Levy puts this concern in the same frame as the issue of affirmative action in the MSM*, which is on everyone’s minds these days as law professor Susan Estrich takes Michael Kinsley to task for not running more pieces by women and people of color at the LA Times op-ed page. Levy thinks the problem of building more diversity into the weblogging world is one caused by its decentralization. But he never gets beyond grappling with what is essentially the wrong question. Concerns from minority writers that, just as they are gaining some legitimacy on the op-ed pages, their voices are being drowned out on the web pages by white men talking to largely white audiences is only legitimate to the extent that you think weblogging is a form of journalism, which it is not. Weblogging is far more like writing letters to your friends about some of the things that interest you.

*We’re all supposed to know by now that this refers to the “mainstream media”, right?

From the fantastic New Scientist Back Page – The last word: “It’s an unfortunate question I know, but why does human excrement smell so badly? I realise cows eat different foods, but their excrement is far less offensive. Why is ours so awful?”

Call me a curmudgeon but my first reaction is — what are we going to learn five, ten or fifteen years down the line about the side effects of this??

Thanks to Dan Hartung for pointing me to this proposal to change the name of Borderline Personality Disorder. Diagnostic categories in mental health work both impose a tyranny and an opportunity, even when used with elegance and precision, which, as readers of FmH know, I have long felt is rare in modern psychiatric practice. DSM-IV, the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of acceptable psychiatric diagnoses and their criteria, has defined a number of personality disorders on a separate ‘diagnostic axis’ than the major mental disorders. I have long taught about how to understand and treat borderline personality disorder, which is the most controversial of these axis II disorders. Even though I feel classifying someone with that label with precision serves a useful purpose in clinical communication as a shorthand for a number of characteristics a clinician might expect to find in treating them, the term is often applied freely to anyone who ‘feels like a borderline’, in other words patients when they are angry toward us, have self-destructive tendencies, are irritating and challenging to treat, or inspire dislike, anger, disdain, avoidance or hatred in their treaters. This makes the diagnosis meaningless, a sort of acting out by the clinician which defeats our best efforts at both clinical clarity and avoiding pejoratives. A masterful modern psychiatrist, George Vaillant, used to give a lecture to psychiatric trainees entitled something like “The Beginning of Wisdom: Never Call Anyone a Borderline.” Others, such as the essayist linked here, feel that because the way the term is used is often pejorative, we should change it. I think that is a fruitless proposition. Since whatever replaces the term ‘borderline’ will continue to reference a class of patients who have some attributes we find disagreeable, any sufficiently disagreeable patient will be diagnosed with that label in the same off-the-cuff manner. Whatever term it is will lose its clinical precision and assume the same disparaging connotations the current term has. Even if the language is new or different, a pejorative is a pejorative. People can readily recognize cursing or name-calling even in a foreign language they do not speak.

There is nothing special about psychiatric pejoratives either. Consider for a minute how powerful our vernacular terms for excrement are, and how rapidly they generalize as references not precisely to deposits of stool but to anything for which we have sufficient distaste or contempt.

But hold on; if the name of the condition were more precisely reflective of its description, if it were more ‘experience-near’, could that itself encourage greater accuracy and precision every time we used it? So say some proponents of a name change. They certainly have a point that, if it is worth describing this condition for purposes of clinical communication, it is worth describing it well, and ‘borderline personality disorder’ is a poor choice of name. For one thing, objections are raised to the ‘borderline’ moniker, which is a historical anachronism hearkening back to an outmoded, discredited and useless notion that these patients were on the borderline between neurosis and psychosis.

And objections also arise to calling it a personality disorder. The original notion was that the main axis, axis I, of DSM (-IV and its predecessors) listed the mental conditions that had a biological origin, in other words illnesses or diseases. In contrast, axis II contained a catalogue of different personality styles which endured over a person’s life and which, taken to an extreme and rigid extent, caused distress or dysfunction in the person’s life and thus warranted being called personality disorders. On axis I were intended to be placed disorders which were treatable with biological approaches such as medicines, whereas one approached personality problems with psychotherapy. In a sense, axis II was a concession and a shrinking pied á terre for the increasingly disenfranchised psychoanalysts, who were rapidly losing the battle for the future of psychiatry to the biological psychiatrists.

However, the placement of borderline personality disorder on this axis II has seemed increasingly problematic, as many psychiatrists have come to see its core features more as on a continuum with axis I mental illnesses in the areas of mood, impulse and thought disorders. And the enormous expenditure of psychiatric effort on trying to treat these extremely distressed and vexing patients has included alot of medication treatment. Although this is a controversial assertion, many find the borderline condition vey responsive to medication treatment. (I myself think borderlines can be judiciously medicated to their benefit, but usually they are blasted with everything in the pharmacological armamentarium at once in desperation and frustration — both the patient’s and the prescriber’s).

In a larger sense, the hard and fast distinctions between biologically- and personality-based distress in general are melting down, and many of the other personality disorders on axis II are subject to pharmacological as well as psychotherapeutic approaches with some degrees of success. So, many of us find the entire distinction between axis I and axis II (not just the issue of the placement of the borderline condition on the latter and thus whether it should be callled a personality disorder) to be specious and clinically meaningless. Furthermore, if there is a rationale for describing personality structure and style alongside mental illness, many have come to feel that a pigeonholing (categorical) approach might not be as good as a dimensional one. (Take the descriptive power of the Meyers-Briggs test, for example.)

Another reason for a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is to facilitate research into mental health conditions. It should go without saying that if the members of a diagnostic category are heterogeneous, no meaningful research conclusions can emerge from studying them as if they had something in common. So sloppily diagnosing very different sorts of people as ‘borderlines’ (or whatever else you might want to call the condition) will result in inconclusive findings when research is done to try to figure out what is wrong with them. This inconclusiveness then feeds back into the discussion as to whether the diagnostic category is meaningful. When, all along, it is not so much a matter of what you call them as how carefully, accurately and precisely you apply the existing diagnostic criteria, no matter what the condition is called.

“Rats can’t vomit. They can’t burp either, and they don’t experience heartburn. Rats can’t vomit for several related reasons…”

Imagination Gets Its Due. My family and I have been quite taken by Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, an animated series about — what else? — a home full of people’s unwanted imaginary friends, as well as a few sympatico humans. Here is an essay about research establishing the perhaps-surprising prevalence of imaginary friends among a group of 100 7-year olds. The reearchers are among a contingent of psychologists who feel the role of imagination and fantasy in child development has been underestimated, and that it is fundamental. his counters a recent trend suggesting that children’s underestimated ability to build reality-based theories and models of the world around them is their essential cognitive tool; that they are more like little scientists than little dreamers. I think a false dichotomy is being posited. The genius of the French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was to understand that children’s cognitive development can be understood in terms of alternating stages of extension and consolidation. A reality-based grasp of the world is the platform upon which imaginative and fantastical elaboration is built, and the fantasies in turn extend the child’s viridical understanding and modelling. It sounds abit like what the artists among us do in adult culture, and it is not surprising that at least one of the ‘imagination psychologists’ has been interested in studying this more directly:

One way to think about what happens in my own sort of work is that the therapist becomes similarly engaged in creating an imaginary version of the client. Many of these have a haunting presence beyond the therapy hour or even the termination of the therapy. And, likewise, the client’s imaginative creation of an idealized version of the therapist as an imaginary companion (I hesitate to say ‘playmate’) is instrumental to the changes brought about by the psychotherapy. The therapist wants to yield the power to control the narrative emerging in the therapy to the therapy patient, and it is often the made-up version the therapist imaginatively creates who takes over the job of composing the patient’s life story.

Jesse Kornbluth:

“World mourns,” or something similar, most of the headlines say. Of course, I’m no Catholic, and I say this with all due respects to the feelings of my Catholic and other readers who may have felt in some sense that they have lost a spiritual leader of theirs. He was certainly a very pious man and probably a very nice person. But I’m sorry, I just cannot feel all that griefstricken about the death of the Pope. His greatness, such as it was, seemed to lie in having been some mixture of captive and facilitator of the reactionary ideology of a rapacious establishment that does little good for the world, in the process facilitating third world overpopulation and poverty, the epidemic spread of AIDS and unwanted pregnancy, and generally oppressing people on the basis of their gender, their sexual preferences and their level of susceptibility to guilt. I grieve for them; their funerals are far less lavish.

John Paul’s greatest papal role models were apparently a pope from the sixth century and nineteenth-century Pope Pius IX, who was disparaged by many as anti-Semitic but whom he beatified. It was during Pius’ reign that the Church had promulgated the doctrine of papal infallibility, which John Paul cherished. His conservative authoritarianism has polarized both the Church and the world’s view of Catholicism. He is celebrated for his inclusionism; he had to reach outside the Western world, where the Church’s grip is seriously eroded. He was the ‘rock star’ pope, a charismatic showman who did not so much embrace as seduce. He will be remembered for peddling the Church’s dogma by personal appearance, by travelling alot. You can’t blame a man for that; I wish my job involved more international travel. But it is not an achievement in itself, any more than there was any inherent heroism in being the first Polish Pope. Catholic intellectualism fared poorly indeed under this pope. He is credited with contributing to the downfall of Communism, which is quite a stretch in any sense other than that he came from a former Communist country. His greatest legacy, and it is a dubious one at that, may have been to hold the line against liberation theology. To put it simply, this was a papacy in which faith was stood to oppose both justice and thoughtfulness.

Especially because over ninety percent of the cardinals electing the next pope were appointed by him, he is likely to be succeeded by another who largely fits the very same mold, ad infinitum. The Catholic Church grows quickly bankrupt in the Western World. The next Pope, if not from the developing world himself (could the Church seriously entertain the idea of a non-white yet?) must be someone appealing to the heathens in the fertile Third World waiting to be converted and exploited for the continued sustenance and survival of the Church.

How much of a sober appraisal of the impact of Catholicism and the true significance of its leader for the latter quarter of the twentieth century, the only Pope half the world’s people have ever known, will we get in the orgiastic media frenzy covering his death?

A reader pointed me to this weblog by Alex Marshall, a New York writer who thinks about design, sociology, urban design and its politics. Not everybody’s cup of tea, but thoughtful. He posts only several times a month, but recent items have included:

• Cities of Gloom
• Looking Good, Working Bad
• Build It and They Will Come
• Living the Balanced Life
• Car Alarms Suck
• Do Europeans Do It Better?
• Roads vs. Rails

[thanks, lawrence]

I can’t really see how the autopsy can settle the question of whether Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state or not, as her husband hopes. (Yahoo! News)

Just last week, I was reading reports that some geologists think the massive December 26th Indonesian quake that triggered the catastrophic tsunamis had not relieved the tension in that seismically active area but, counterintuitively, made a subsequent earthquake more likely. Now come reports of a ‘great’ quake, estimated at magnitude 8.5-8.7 on the Richter Scale, along the same fault. (CNN) What amazes me is that authorities are essentially guessing that there will be no appreciable tsunami from this quake because no one has reported one yet. That is the best we can do.

New England Journal of Medicine editorial on the Terry Schiavo case by Dr. Timothy Quill, in .pdf format. As Quill points out,the medical facts are incontrovertible. The deprivation of oxygen to her brain after a 1990 cardiac arrest caused by complications of her eating disorder has left Terry Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state, in which,

Schiavo’s parents’ objections to terminating life support seem to be dually based. Against the consensus of all relevant medical parties, they sentimentally refuse to accept the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state which, after fifteen years, is irrefutably irreversible. But that they appear not to understand or accept this is understandable; Dr Quill says he is not surprised that some might interpret her “apparent alertness and movement as meaningful”. But, at every stage in the subsequent morass of legal proceedings, courts have ruled that, by the standard of “clear and convincing” evidence, the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state is warranted.

But this is not just a difference of opinion on diagnosis or prognosis. The Schindlers also have attempted to subvert the central legal and ethical principle by which decisions about terminating life support must be made when the patient herself is incapable of expressing a preference and has not left any advance directives. This is the so-called standard of substituted judgment. The family member with decision-making authority is obligated to make not the decision that is best for the family or the one that they want for their loved one but the one, as best can be inferred, that the patient would want for herself. As Dr. Quill describes it,

I myself think the principle of substituted judgment is normally honored more in the breach than in the observance. However, this is frequently not a problem when the interests of the decision-making party and of the patient are essentually congruent and there is no substantial dissent from other stakeholders. Only in such a rancorous case as Schiavo’s must the courts become involved. And here they have; and have ruled that the evidence Michael Schiavo has presented about his wife’s own preferences meets the standards, and makes prolongation of life both “unethical and illegal.” Dr. Quill concludes by hoping that Schiavo’s case reinvigorates our determination to put aside distractions and self-interests that interfere with this purified focus on what the patient wishes. It probably bears mentioning again, as Dr. Quill does, that Schiavo is not suffering with the withdrawal of feeding, as she no longer has the mental activity to experience distress. Dying in this way can be a “humane, natural process (humans died in this way for thousands of years before the advent of feeding tubes).”

But this case is more than just a challenge to us to rededicate ourselves to upholding the ethical and legal principle of substituted judgment. The tragedy is more compounded than Dr. Quill’s editorial conclusions would suggest. As I have written before, part of the problem is the limited definition of death to which we cling as a society. Despite lip service to the concept of ‘brain death’, our commonsense notion of death requires the cessation of all biological activity. As a resident early in my career I had a macabre moonlighting job in which I was called in to a nursing home to pronounce death; it is the doctor’s task in ‘pronouncing’ to be sure there is no heartbeat, respiration etc. But, especially with the rapid growth in sophisticated neurological tools and tests for assessment of brain activity, this is an increasingly inadequate notion of death. The Schindlers’ objections at every stage that she might recover, and her supporters’ talk about Michael Schiavo and the medical establishment ‘killing’ her, certainly makes sense if one thinks she is still alive and the withdrawal of life support is shortening her life. But, conceptually, she might better be thought of as no longer alive. It is just that the process of her dying has so far been measured in decades instead of the more usual span of moments, and all that we are doing is needlessly prolonging her dying further, prolonging the meaningless heartbeat in an assemblage of organs, tissues, protoplasm … not in a person. I find the lack of recognition of this distinction troubling and not just a little pitiful.

Senate Majority Leader and physician Bill Frist claims to be confident that Terry Schiavo is not in a persistent vegetative state from viewing a digital video of her. It is a relief that he is in the Senate where the ethical standards are far more lax than they are with respect to diagnosing sight unseen in the practice of medicine. Here is a proposal to compile readers’ digital pictures or videos of their medical problems and send them to Frist to diagnose and recommend treatment. He could single-handedly contain the nation’s healthcare cost crisis with his far more thrifty manner of practicing! Aren’t there some other physicians in Congress who could pitch in and finally fulfill the civic duties they took on when they ran for office? ‘Howard Dean might have brought us the “ah-ha!” moment in politics and the Internet. Dr. Frist is now pleased to present us with the “Kodak” moment.’ [via boing boing]

Just as GIs are starting to opt out, so I think should recruiters, for the good both of their physical and emotional health and that of their country.

Senate Majority Leader and physician Bill Frist claims to be confident that Terry Schiavo is not in a persistent vegetative state from viewing a digital video of her. It is a relief that he is in the Senate where the ethical standards are far more lax than they are with respect to diagnosing sight unseen in the practice of medicine. Here is a proposal to compile readers’ digital pictures or videos of their medical problems and send them to Frist to diagnose and recommend treatment. He could single-handedly contain the nation’s healthcare cost crisis with his far more thrifty manner of practicing! Aren’t there some other physicians in Congress who could pitch in and finally fulfill the civic duties they took on when they ran for office? ‘Howard Dean might have brought us the “ah-ha!” moment in politics and the Internet. Dr. Frist is now pleased to present us with the “Kodak” moment.’ [via boing boing]

Just to make one thing perfectly clear — Blogger sucks these days. More often than not in the past month or so, I have not been able to post new posts, edit old posts or both. You have all probably noticed multiple copies of the same post in a row here; I am sometimes not reliably able to tell if something has published so I repeat myself. At other times the process appears to hang in the middle but unbeknownst to me has gone on to complete the publishing process somewhere in the dim shadows behind the bit bucket. You would think the Google takeover would give them the resources to have an adequate number of reliable servers…

Oh,well, this should be my worst anguish in life…

“What’s the best band name ever?” (Guardian.UK [via largehearted boy]) (I’m from another era , but personally I think the frisson I got the first time I heard the name ‘Big Brother and the Holding Company’ has never been beat.)

If you don’t know them, you should.

Ours is an age in which the dictum that everyone is entitled to their own opinion is taken to a fault. Nevertheless, all strong opinions do not have equal validity and there is no inherent obligation to honor both sides of a story equally. Only the brain-dead (with apologies to Terry Schiavo) should do that. Here, Jesse Kornbluth makes the case that it is possible to discern the relative integrity of husband Michael Schiavo’s wishes for his wife Terry and those of Terry’s parents. As Kornbluth’s epigram for today, from Daniel Moynihan, states, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” (I hope readers will forgive Moynihan’s dismissal by omission of the opinions of half the world’s population…) If — and I concede this is a big ‘if’ — the facts Kornbluth observes here are correct, it seems incontrovertible that the Schindlers’ motives are far more suspect than Schiavo’s. Either they are exploiting the situation for their own selfish gain, or they are being exploited by the hypocritical agenda of the right-to-lifers, or both. And they are caught in their lies about it. Furthermore, as I wrote here long ago in reflecting on Terry Schiavo’s right to die, the Schindlers’ assertion of the reversibility of their daughter’s condition flies in the face of medical hope, even hope for a miracle. It is not a question so much of whether Michael Schiavo just wants to move on. It is much more one of whether Terry Schiavo will be allowed to move on. (BeliefNet [thanks to walker])

It also bears noting that constitutional scholars feel that Bush’s Congress had no standing to take the action it did this week in bringing the matter to federal court. Although they took pains to insist that this has no bearing on any case but Schiavo’s, don’t forget that Bush’s Supreme Court said the same thing in usurping the people’s right to elect their president in 2000.

A method for direct iPod-to-iPod song transfer in realtime, although of course Apple won’t like it. It’s quick and dirty and could use some refinement. ` [via Largehearted Boy]

“Any chimp can play human for a day.
Use his opposable thumbs to iron his uniform
and run for office on election day
fancy himself a real decision maker
and deploy more troops than salt shakers

But it’s a jungle when war is made
and you’ll panic and throw your own shit at the enemy
The camera pulls back to reveal your true identity
Look, it’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing
A smoking gun holding ape”

— Rilo Kiley

I considered for a moment whether the study was funded by the makers of Adderall, the major competitor of Ritalin for the lucrative attentions of those prescribing for attention deficit disorder. I am being abit facetious but there is alot potentially at stake here, and I am not talking simply in financial terms. This finding ought to prompt a challenge to some of the conceptual assumptions and the intellectual laxness in mental health treatment.

The mental health field has gone rampant with the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in both children and adults, with no discretion about the distinction between normal population variations in attentional style on the one hand and, on the other, disordered neural attentional mechanisms. I can’t tell you how many times, sitting in a discussion of a case, someone had the bright idea that, simply because the patient couldn’t concentrate or focus well, they ought to be considered for stimulants and diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder. People have decried the whole Diagnostic and Statistical Manual approach which dominates psychiatric diagnosis, but at least it requires a patient to meet stringent and well-defined criteria to be considered to have a given disorder. Certainly, in the DSM system the decision about what is a disorder and what is not is a work in progress but, especially as it is linked to the available data about biological abnormalities and treatment response in a given condition, it is certainly better than what I see throughout the field, which is diagnosing by got feeling. This is especially true when there is a distinction between a commonsense usage of a term and the technical sense in which it is used medically — for instance, “She’s been abused,” “He can’t pay attention,” “She appears anxious”, “He seems depressed” or “That’s crazy thinking.”

Yes, I am using commonsense usage when I say that classification based on the above kinds of observation is crazy; in other words, thoughtless diagnosis. Gregory Bateson said, “Information is a distinction that makes a difference.” Perhaps it should not be the case, but more thoughtful diagnostic distinction is needed when it makes a difference to treatment approach and the treatment is not benign. As a touchstone, consider the situation with antipsychotic medications. For forty years or more, the field has been cautious about diagnosing a psychotic condition because the earlier generation of antipsychotic medications had serious irreversible disfiguring neurological side effects (tardive dyskinesia) and other severe risks (neuroleptic malignant syndrome). Stringent legal protections were put into place before someone could be given these medications against their will or if they are not competent to make an informed decision with the ability to weigh the risks and benefits. Perhaps we will see some ramping down of the out-of-control rates of cavalier stimulant prescribing, particularly to children, if the cancer link is validated. IMHO, it ought not even to take that!

I considered for a moment whether the study was funded by the makers of Adderall, the major competitor of Ritalin for the lucrative attentions of those prescribing for attention deficit disorder. I am being abit facetious but there is alot potentially at stake here, and I am not talking simply in financial terms. This finding ought to prompt a challenge to some of the conceptual assumptions and the intellectual laxness in mental health treatment.

The mental health field has gone rampant with the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in both children and adults, with no discretion about the distinction between normal population variations in attentional style on the one hand and, on the other, disordered neural attentional mechanisms. I can’t tell you how many times, sitting in a discussion of a case, someone had the bright idea that, simply because the patient couldn’t concentrate or focus well, they ought to be considered for stimulants and diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder. People have decried the whole Diagnostic and Statistical Manual approach which dominates psychiatric diagnosis, but at least it requires a patient to meet stringent and well-defined criteria to be considered to have a given disorder. Certainly, in the DSM system the decision about what is a disorder and what is not is a work in progress but, especially as it is linked to the available data about biological abnormalities and treatment response in a given condition, it is certainly better than what I see throughout the field, which is diagnosing by got feeling. This is especially true when there is a distinction between a commonsense usage of a term and the technical sense in which it is used medically — for instance, “She’s been abused,” “He can’t pay attention,” “She appears anxious”, “He seems depressed” or “That’s crazy thinking.”

Yes, I am using commonsense usage when I say that classification based on the above kinds of observation is crazy; in other words, thoughtless diagnosis. Gregory Bateson said, “Information is a distinction that makes a difference.” Perhaps it should not be the case, but more thoughtful diagnostic distinction is needed when it makes a difference to treatment approach and the treatment is not benign. As a touchstone, consider the situation with antipsychotic medications. For forty years or more, the field has been cautious about diagnosing a psychotic condition because the earlier generation of antipsychotic medications had serious irreversible disfiguring neurological side effects (tardive dyskinesia) and other severe risks (neuroleptic malignant syndrome). Stringent legal protections were put into place before someone could be given these medications against their will or if they are not competent to make an informed decision with the ability to weigh the risks and benefits. Perhaps we will see some ramping down of the out-of-control rates of cavalier stimulant prescribing, particularly to children, if the cancer link is validated. IMHO, it ought not even to take that!

“Two years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon has formally included in key strategic plans provisions for launching preemptive strikes against nations thought to pose a threat to the United States.” (Yahoo! News ) Isn’t it exhilarating to know that the decisions about which nations pose a sufficient threat will be in the hands of the likes of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld?

I have been waiting for this trend to start being noticed; media coverage will encourage and embolden, hopefully. Like-minded people should be looking for opportunities to aid and support conscientious refusal to serve in America’s most recent dirty, immoral and illegal war.

The other day, in my ‘hell in a Handbasket’ post, a commenter was non-plused. Acts of brutality happen during war, no big deal. I was amazed no one begged to differ in the comments section them. Bush and his cronies are heartlessly, brutally, twisting the psyches of a generation of young men and women, making them monsters. Don’t for a moment think that is limited to the 26 GIs who will be prosecuted and scapegoated for these atrocities. It is a condition created by subjecting hundreds of thousands to a twisted, unjust and pointless brutalization of another people.

Via truthout, which labelled a spade a spade: forgery.

“Suspects Possibly Taken To Nations That Torture” (Washington Post)

Birth of a Pundit: Reprint of a Chicago Reader profile by Christopher Hayes of a 19-year old aspiring right-wing demagogue at Northwestern University. As Hayes points out, it sheds light on the ways in which the conservative movement shapes the terms of political discourse in the country. (Campus Progress)

You don’t think this is the decline and fall? It just stuck me suddenly as I scanned the five top articles in the New York Times this morning:

1. Two prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan were beaten by soldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths.
2. A man on trial for rape shot and killed the judge in his case, a court stenographer and a sheriff’s deputy in a courthouse rampage.
3. Blood Ties: 2 Officers’ Long Path to Mob Murder Indictments
4. Insurers, working with the F.B.I., said they have broken up an elaborate scam in which doctors filed more than $1 billion of fraudulent insurance claims.
5. Drinking Game Can Be a Deadly Rite of Passage: The “power hour” tradition involves 21-year-olds going to a bar at midnight on their birthdays and trying to down 21 shots in the hour or so before the bar closes.