Threat of ‘dirty bomb’ softened; Ashcroft’s remarks annoy White House:

‘Attorney General John Ashcroft on Monday overstated the potential threat posed by ”dirty bomb” suspect Abdullah Al Muhajir, Bush administration and law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

Ashcroft’s remarks annoyed the White House and led the administration to soften the government’s descriptions of the alleged plot. ”I don’t think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk and (Al Muhajir’s) coming in here obviously to plan further deeds,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told CBS on Tuesday.’ USA Today

Harold Meyerson: Greens to Liberals: Drop Dead!: “Ask any liberal to identify the force in American politics most intent on destroying progressive prospects and causes and you’re sure to hear that it’s the Bush administration or the Republican right or some such reactionary power. Let me gently suggest, however, that a very different force has wormed its way onto this list, and may indeed be right at the top: the Green Party.” The American Prospect

Scenes From a ‘Weird’ Tech Fest:

“…(W)ith speakers like famed British physicist Freeman Dyson, singing robotic birds, techno DJs, a bring-and-buy market of ancient computer parts, Moroccan tea with free baklava and curries served by an Indian couple, London’s Extreme Computing weekend seemed more Woodstock for the geek generation.

Billed as the “Festival of Inappropriate Technologies,” the one-day extravaganza packed several hundred attendees into Camden Town Hall in the center of the city. Instead of name badges, people wrote the domain name of their e-mail address on the badge and were supposed to try and guess names.” Wired

Will Tasmanian Tiger Clone Work? Wired

Money and madness:

“A child who doesn’t like doing math homework may be diagnosed with the mental illness developmental-arithmetic disorder (No.315.4). A child who argues with her parents may be diagnosed as having a mental illness called oppositional-defiant disorder (No.313.8). And people critical of the legislation now snaking through Congress that purports to “end discrimination against patients seeking treatment for mental illness” may find themselves labeled as being in denial and diagnosed with the mental illness called noncompliance-with-treatment disorder (No.15.81).

The psychiatric diagnoses suggested above are no joke. They represent a few of the more than 350 “mental disorders” listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the billing bible for mental disorders which commingles neurological diseases with psychiatric diagnoses. (Click here to see more examples of the mental disorders listed in the DSM-IV.) Whether the described diagnoses are real diseases or subjective speculation, science is at the heart of the debate about whether lawmakers will require employers and insurers to cover mental illness on the same level as physical disease…” Insight

I agree with the dubious basis of oppositional-defiant disorder. A preponderance of the following evidence, I teach medical students and psychiatric residents, is necessary for something to qualify as a psychiatric disease: (a) genetic component; (b) demonstrable anatomical, neurochemical or physiological alteration; (c) nonrandom association with other conditions demonstrated to have a physiological basis; (d) response to medication, and degree of response correlates with extent of correction of neurochemical/physiological alterations by the medication; (e) exacerbation of dysfunction when administered agents demonstrated to worsen neurochemical/physiological alterations; (f) animal model with analogous behavioral disturbance may exist, and abnormalities in anatomy, neurochemistry or physiology readily demonstrable in affected animals. A number of the “non-diseases” — by which Insight seems to mean anything treated by psychiatrists — you’ll find if you follow their invitation to “click on” are in fact well-established disease entities. These people are still having difficulty, apparently, accepting that mind and body interact. While I have doubts about conduct disorder, pedophilia disorder, and, as I noted, oppositional-defiant disorder, the remainder on their list are as much diseases, in my opinion, as diabetes or hypertension.

Scientists say women are better liars than men Ananova

The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them by Owen Flanagan:

“The illusions we must give up–concerning free will, personal identity, and the existence of the soul–and the (surprisingly rich) ideas we can keep.

Traditional ideas about the basic nature of humanity are under attack as never before. The very attributes that make us human–free will, the permanence of personal identity, the existence of the soul–are being undermined and threatened by the current revolution in the science of the mind. If the mind is the brain, and therefore a physical object subject to deterministic laws, how can we have free will? If most of our thoughts and impulses are unconscious, how can we be morally responsible for what we do?

The Problem of the Soul shows the way out of these seemingly intractable paradoxes. Framing the conflict in terms of two dominant visions of the mind–the “manifest image” of humanistic philosophy and theology, and the scientific image–renowned philosopher Owen Flanagan demonstrates that there is, in fact, common ground, and that we need not give up our ideas of moral responsibility and personal freedom in order to have an empirically sound view of the human mind.” amazon.com

“What it means to be 98% chimpanzee.” New Scientist

Are Girls Mean?

‘…The frenzy over so-called mean girls, the subject of (Rachel) Simmons’ book, Odd Girl Out, as well as a spate of other books just out (Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes; Emily White’s Fast Girls; Phyllis Chesler’s Women’s Inhumanity to Women), is building. She recently appeared on Oprah — for the second time. Newsweek just put a mean girls story on the cover. And for the second week in a row, she was listed on the New York Times best seller list. (Last week she climbed to number 6.)

Buoyed by a wave she doesn’t entirely understand, Simmons has come to conclude that the interest in her topic is linked to the concern over adolescent bullying provoked by the Columbine high school shootings, whose perpetrators had been ostracized by their peers. While Columbine involved boys, Simmons says, “it was only a matter of time before girls were discussed.” ‘ Seattle Weekly [via AlterNet]

Precis of The Rationality of Psychological Disorders: Psychobizarreness Theory:

“In his book, … (Yacov) Rofé reviews the three major schools of psychopathology and finds that they lack empirical validation and are unable to account for fundamental theoretical issues. Therefore, an integrative theory of psychopathology, termed Psychobizarreness Theory (PBT), was proposed. PBT defines neurotic disorders as bizarre behaviors, using five operational diagnostic criteria, and claims that these symptoms are coping mechanisms, which patients consciously and rationally select when confronted with unbearable levels of stress. Like psychoanalysis, PBT views repression as the key to understanding neuroses. However, in PBT repression is defined in conscious terms, in accordance with experimental and research data, and thus, the symptom constitutes a distractive maneuver employed to eliminate stress-related thoughts from attention. Hence, repression is the consequence rather than the cause of neurotic symptoms. Nevertheless, patients are unaware of their repressive endeavors due to sophisticated self-deceptive processes. Furthermore, PBT equates the process of symptom selection with economic decisions, whereby a certain ‘product’ is chosen according to the individual’s needs, available ‘merchandise’ and cost-benefit analysis. The theory also integrates the various forms of therapy into one theoretical model, accounting for their efficacy in conscious, rational terms. Overall, PBT synthesizes a large amount of research and clinical data and may settle the long and bitter dispute in the field of psychopathology.” CogPrints

A New Kind of Science: “Among a small group of very smart people, the publication of A New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram, has been anticipated with the anxiety aroused in literary circles by, say, Jonathan Franzen’s recent novel, The Corrections. For more than a decade, Wolfram, a theoretical physicist turned millionaire software entrepreneur, has been laboring in solitude on a work that, he has promised, will change the way we see the world. Adding to the suspense, the book has been announced and withdrawn as the artist returned to his garret to tinker, ignoring the bad vibes and hexes cast by jealous colleagues hoping to see him fall flat on his face.” NY Times Books

Why new dads have all the fun: “Study shows that fathers find their new babies very satisfying, don’t lose as much sleep as mums – and still get more nights out than them.” Guardian Observer UK

“If we’re so smart, why are we still at the mercy of treacherous microorganisms? Frank T. Vertosick’s The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing asks readers to let go of brain worship and look at the incredible problem-solving skills of viruses, ants, and other lowly creatures.” amazon.com

Experiment Offers Look Through Eyes of Autism: “Enlisting Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and a high-tech eye-tracking device developed for the military, researchers at Yale ran experiments that came closer than anything yet to offering a look at the world as seen through the eyes of people with autism.

In one experiment, described in the current issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers compared the eye movements of a highly intelligent autistic adult and a control subject of the same age, sex and I.Q. as they watched the relentless emotional conflicts of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

What the experiment showed was that the two subjects were seeing the movie in starkly different ways…” NY Times

CNN.com – How to survive a ‘dirty bomb’; and:

Paul Robinson: The Philosophy of Punctuation

Book taste linked to dreams: If you like fiction, your dreams are likely to be stranger but you’ll remember them more readily. Fantasy readers have more nightmares and ‘lucid’ dreams. “The research also suggests children who read scary books are three times more likely to have nightmares.” What does ‘suggested’ mean here? The adult findings probably mean that personality type shapes both reading preferences and types of dreams — correlation but not causation. While it is not hard to understand how reading a child a scary story might cause a nightmare, will it shape her personality so that she has a lifelong tendency toward nightmares? I doubt it. BBC

The Gauss Rifle:

A Magnetic Linear Accelerator — “This very simple toy uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a steel marble at a target at high speed.” [via leuschke]

spammimic – hide a message in spam:

There are terrific tools (like PGP and GPG) for encrypting your mail. If somebody along the way looks at the mail they can’t understand it. But they do know you are sending encrypted mail to your pal.

The answer: encode your message into something innocent looking.

Your messages will be safe and nobody will know they’re encrypted!

There is tons of spam flying around the Internet. Most people can’t delete it fast enough. It’s virtually invisible. This site gives you access to a program that will encrypt a short message into spam. Basically, the sentences it outputs vary depending on the message you are encoding. Real spam is so stupidly written it’s sometimes hard to tell the machine written spam from the genuine article.

Israeli Device Detects Cell Phones Acting as Bugs: ‘With a slight modification, cell phones become high-quality bugs. An owner can call the phone from anywhere in the world without it emitting a ringing tone while its screen remains blank, apparently turned off.

“The beauty of the cell phone as a bug is that it’s an innocent looking and ubiquitous object,” said Ben Te’eni, co-founder of Netline Communications Technologies, which has developed a device for detecting cell phone communications, especially from cell phones in apparently dormant mode.’ Yahoo! News

Patenting the Harvard Scientist: ‘In a new phase of the battle to patent living organisms, the parents of one of the Harvard scientists credited with creating the Harvard Mouse are seeking a patent on their son. Says the mother, “clearly our Harvard Son meets the test of being a composition of matter that is novel, useful and not obvious.” ‘ This is from 357 Magazine, a unique publication where each article is exactly 357 words in length (with title, excluding by-line). ” But why 357? You can say at lot with three hundred and fifty seven words, but you’re not in much danger of saying too much. It’s a bit haikuish in that you have to think what every word does. You don’t have too many to spare. Each one has to mean something. Even the ones you leave out, especially the ones you leave out, have to really mean something.”

Film: Material Witnesses: “An itemized casualty list of calamities across multiple nations, The Trials of Henry Kissinger is something of a microcosm of the 2002 Human Rights Watch festival itself. Condensing Christopher Hitchens’s enraged deposition into 80 lucid minutes, directors Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki map out Kissinger’s collusions with Nixon and Ford in the short-circuiting of the ’68 Paris peace talks, secret bombing of Cambodia, upending of democracy in Chile, and savaging of East Timor. The revered elder statesman becomes Machiavellian tyrant-as-apparatchik, driven equally by chillingly abstract realpolitik and panting power lust. Hitchens & co. sometimes press their case too hard (as when they posit Kissinger as the virtual lone gunman who distended the American war in Vietnam by four years) and remain hazy on the logistics of charging him in international court. Quibbles aside, though, Trials is an indispensable primer on U.S. foreign policy—especially during wartime.” The Village Voice

Film: Stray Dogs: “Ten years on, American independent moviemakers seem to have come to terms with the anxiety of Quentin Tarantino’s influence — the guns-&-blather template no longer gluts Sundance, and third-generation straight-to-tapers like 4 Dogs Playing Poker and Gunblast Vodka occupy only nominal Blockbuster shelf space. Not so with the British, whose industry’s ironic-gangster saliva glands are still in overdrive, and whose reawakened taste for legendary Swinging London hoodlums scans oddly like cultural pride.” The Village Voice

Potter trailer making magic on the Web: “A teaser trailer for the next Harry Potter film has been posted on the Internet, movie studio Warner Bros. said on Tuesday.

The teaser lasts for only 30 seconds but is enough to let fans have a look at Dobby the house elf, a character introduced in J.K. Rowling’s second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets…Warner Bros… will release the film in the United Kingdom on Nov. 15, 2002.” CNET

iPod opening up for Windows users CNET

“If the past 18 months have been what policy looks like with Karl Rove only partly in control, one shudders to think what comes next.” Paul Krugman on The Rove Doctrine: ” For the most distinctive feature of Mr. Rove’s modus operandi is not his conservatism; it’s his view that the administration should do whatever gives it a political advantage. This includes, of course, exploiting the war on terrorism — something Mr. Rove has actually boasted about. But it also includes coddling special interests.” NY Times op-ed

Neutralizing Bush Critics: “For the president, the drama of the dirty-bomb threat and its successful interdiction … sent a clear warning to those Congressional leaders who are preparing to focus a long political season on how the nation’s intelligence-gathering system broke down during Mr. Bush’s watch.” NY Times news analysis

“Big Bird needed to molt…” Children’s TV Catches Up With How Kids Watch: “The assumption that very young children can’t sit still to watch long narrative stretches on TV has been proven wrong.” NY Times

Remember my post down below feeling flattered to be called a nice liberal blog by ‘neoconservative’ Joe Katzman? Katzman represented the blogging world as a human tide from the right in reaction to the alleged disenfranchisement of their viewpoint in the mainstream media. Well, perhaps I should have been offended instead. Although I assume Katzman isn’t consciously part of any grand conspiracy, it’s clear he’s sensitive to the zeitgeist. And here’s a New York Times piece, A Rift Among Bloggers, which may place Katzman’s stance in the following context:

Thanks in part to the participation of some prominent journalists and academics, the pundit-style blogs quickly reached a level of public and media recognition that other blogs had never achieved. As a result, some latecomers now think Weblogs are inherently political. That has perturbed some Weblog veterans, who say the war bloggers are rewriting history and presenting a distorted view of blogs. They say the diversity of Weblogs is being overshadowed by the attention-getting style of war blogs… (T)he war bloggers say they represent the evolution of a medium that might have languished in obscurity without them.

Along with Kottke, this site, Blogroots, a collaboration among ‘old-school bloggers’ Meg Hourihan, Matt Haughey and Paul Bausch, is at the forefront of the backlash against the pundits. The three are the latest to jump into the weblogging-book craze, with the forthcoming We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs. One question for the warbloggers. If they think they invented the politicization of weblogging after Sept. 11th, what would they make, for example, of the tide of reaction in the weblogging world to the 2000 Presidential dys-election?

Katinka Matson’s Twelve Flowers:

“When I saw Matson’s images I was blown away. Erase from your mind any notion of pixels or any grainy artifact of previous digitalization gear. Instead imagine a painter who could, like Vermeer, capture the quality of light that a camera can, but with the color of paints. That is what a scanner gives you. Now imagine a gifted artist like Matson exploring what the world looks like when it can only see two inches in front of its eye, but with infinite detail! In her flowers one can see every microscopic dew drop, leaf vein, and particle of pollen—in satisfying rich pigmented color. (From the Introduction By Kevin Kelly)” The Edge

Man Who Headed Emergency Site in Oklahoma Accused of Being Impostor:

“The man wearing a green beret and camouflage fatigues called himself Capt. William Clark from the Army’s Special Forces. He arrived two hours after an interstate bridge collapsed and said he was in charge.

Some emergency workers listened to him for a few days until he disappeared from the site. Authorities said Friday that the man is an ex-convict from Missouri who impersonated an officer to get free food, lodging and a pickup truck.” Tampa Bay Online

Global Warming Blamed for Melting Everest Glacier

“A glacier from which Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set out to conquer Mount Everest nearly 50 years ago has retreated three miles up the mountain due to global warming, a U.N. body says.”

A team of climbers, backed by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), reported after their two-week visit last month that the impact of rising temperatures was everywhere to be seen.” Yahoo! News

Interview With Heretical Biologist Rupert Sheldrake Gonzo Science

Did anyone get to see the crescent setting sun? We’re out of luck here on the East Coast of North America, where it was already after sunset when the eclipse happened…

Fibromyalgia Pain Isn’t All In Patients’ Heads, New Brain Study Finds

A new brain-scan study confirms scientifically what fibromyalgia patients have been telling a skeptical medical community for years: They’re really in pain.

In fact, the study finds, people with fibromyalgia say they feel severe pain, and have measurable pain signals in their brains, from a gentle finger squeeze that barely feels unpleasant to people without the disease. The squeeze’s force must be doubled to cause healthy people to feel the same level of pain — and their pain signals show up in different brain areas.

The results, published in the current issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, the journal of the American College of Rheumatology, may offer the proof of fibromyalgia’s physical roots that many doubtful physicians have sought.

As one of the first psychiatrists to pay attention to the then-new entity of fibromyalgia, I wrote and taught about it from two perspectives — both the importance of recognizing the reality of mysterious mind-body complaints and the suffering they cause, as this study points out; and the nondiscriminating way these diagnoses become fads and are applied broadly by clinicians jumping on a bandwagon and by patients invested in the diagnoses as explanations of their vague malaise. Fibromyalgia is one of the more recent entities to occupy what is a perennial niche for controversial syndromes at the interstices of various medical specialties. Some go on to be dismissed as passing fads, others go on to gain scientific veracity, and others linger for quite a long time in a never-never land between those two extremes. So, while the present study makes sense — if the fibromyalgia patients are carefully selected to be a homogeneously, rigidly-defined sample, there will be some objective findings — I would also assert that this probably applies only to a very small subset of patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia in the ‘real world’, and should not be used to legitimize the indiscriminate, ever-broadening application of the label to patients whose suffering should more properly be understood in different (psychological, usually) terms.

Hal Rager, of the weblog blivet, wrote to point out to me that he was a fibromyalgia sufferer. Here’s his take on the same research report:

I was extremely ill six years ago, and fibromyalgia was one of the constellation of things I was diagnosed with. I accept that there may well be a psychosomatic component to fibromyalgia, but I resented like hell the implications by some that my pain was fabricated. If the brain is registering pain, it’s pain. It may be being caused by problems with brain chemistry, but the pain was as real as pain gets.

By the way, there are far broader implications of this study. The assessment of subjective complaints of pain against some objective standard has long been a Holy Grail across disciplines of clinical medicine, for obvious reasons. Longtime FmH readers will know how excited I have been with the developments we’re seeing with functional brain imaging such as fMRI. If it finally allows us to verify and perhaps grade pain experiences (by watching brain regions involved with noxious experiences), we may yet drink from the Grail. Not only could this give guidance to the bitter problems of both the overmedication and undermedication of pain, but might we more readily empathize with neurological analogues to fMRI patterns that indubitably entail pain in humans when we see them in non-human species? On the other hand, how brightly a signal lights up on some objective scale on an fMRI reading doesn’t tell the whole story. By a sort of physiological “Peter Principle’, the subjective experience of pain probably expands to fill every bit of the space allocated for it, and is that any less real?

Psychologist Rx law in N.M. bogged down. “The new prescribing law is set to go in New Mexico, but the training program isn’t.” American Medical News

A great day in Harlem: explore jazz history through one photograph, by Art Kane. And explore Beat history through a wonderful collection of photographs, by Larry Keenan. [both via wood s lot]

Three shot to death at Missouri abbey: “Three people died and one was injured Monday when a gunman opened fire at a Roman Catholic monastery in a remote area of northwest Missouri, the Missouri Highway Patrol reported.

It was not known if the gunman was still on the grounds of the Benedictine monastery and seminary, where about 45 monks live…” CNN No one’s commenting on a motive yet. Tempting to speculate that this relates to the opening floodgates of long overdue attention to rampant sexual abuse by members of the clergy. Or was this just the latest variant on the — now becoming sickeningly mundane — American epidemic of workplace slaughters, e.g. yesterday’s murder of three in a Rhode Island newspaper plant?

A high school friend who reads my weblog wrote to remind me that Forest Hills HS’s other claims to a place in rock ‘n’ roll history include Paul Simon, former centerfielder for our baseball team (he met Art Garfunkel, also an FHHS student, in detention after school); and Leslie West, lead singer-guitarist for Mountain (anyone remember them?). [thanks, Jerry!]

I also seem to recall that Walter Becker — or was it Donald Fagen? — of Steely Dan supposedly graduated from my high school.

Quark Soup: this weblog by David Appell, who is a PhD in physics and a writer, was recommended by an FmH’er who wrote:

“I just discovered this very well-informed & well-written science-oriented weblog by a science journalist. He’s been clarifying global warming in great detail these past two weeks, and has some rather sharp things to say about the pretensions of the punditocracy in such matters.”

U.S. Arrests American Accused of Planning ‘Dirty Bomb’ Attack: ‘Attorney General John Ashcroft said today that American authorities had arrested a home-grown terrorist — an American citizen who became an Al Qaeda member — and thereby thwarted a radioactive-bomb attack on the United States.

“We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or `dirty bomb,’ in the United States,” Mr. Ashcroft said in a televised announcement from Moscow,’ emphasizing the close cooperation between the CIA, FBI and Defense Dept. in disrupting the plot — only it is not really clear there is a plot. The information leading to his arrest apperas to come primarily from Abu Zubaydah, the reputed ‘top Al Qaeda official’ arested in Pakistan in March. The suspect, who is reportedly a former Chicago street gang member who converted to Islam after a prison term, has some expertise in bomb-making and some interest in radiological dispersion weapons, and the assumption that Al Qaeda has interest in such weapons has been corroborated by Abu Zubaydah, but officials report “there was not an actual plan.” NY Times [By the way, how likely do you think it is that there is only one such man in the US with such a mission and expertise? -FmH]

US Still Waging Disinformation War Against China? Beijing taken in: “Beijing’s most popular newspaper has unwittingly republished a bogus story about U.S. Congress threats to skip town for Memphis or Charlotte unless Washington builds them a new Capitol building with a retractable dome.

The source? America’s celebrated spoof tabloid, the Onion.” Reuters [thanks, Walker] The original Onion story wasn’t funny enough to blink to, but this is…

Burger Heaven: the perfect burger, gone but not forgotten in fast-food nation. NY Times

Dept. of Political Security — Maureen Dowd: “With the most daring reorganization of government in half a century, George W. Bush hopes to protect something he holds dear: himself.” NY Times op-ed

U.S. Lets Drug Tied to Deaths Back on Market. Lotronex, a real advance in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome, was withdrawn voluntarily at the FDA’s request after the manufacturer and the FDA could not agree on marketing restrictions to reduce severe side effects and risk of death which became apparent in post-marketing surveillance. “But thousands of patients protested the withdrawal, saying Lotronex was the only treatment to have aided them. Their pleas helped to persuade the agency and manufacturer to find a way to reinstate it. Lotronex will return, the agency said — with restrictions. The new rules leave considerable responsibility with doctors, pharmacists and patients to use it correctly and to watch for early signs of intestinal problems, which can be fatal.” On the one hand, leaving responsibility with physicians and patients subject to informed consent is a reasonable, laudable approach. On the other hand, I worry about leaving responsibility in the hands of physicians and patients. NY Times

Text of the controversial Harvard commencement address originally titled “My American Jihad” by Zayed Yasin. Thanks to Christopher Anderson, who pointed me to it and noted it is nowhere to be found on Harvard University’s site. It’s actually pretty tame; the overblown turmoil was only about the use of the term ‘jihad’ in the title, on which Yasin relented before delivering the address. BeliefNet

Psychiatrists fight blurring of line with psychologists. Psychiatrists (MDs) say it “feels like an insult” when a psychologist (a Ph.D.) is appointed to head the prestigious Yale University Child Study Center, especially after the controversy (to which I’ve blinked) over psychologists winning the right to prescribe psychiatric medications in New Mexico. Simiar legislation is in the pipeline in at least eleven other states. I agree with the thrust of the article, that this is about jockeying for a shrinking pool of money for mental health care. However, it is an oversimplification to state that prescribing is the ‘last bastion’ of psychiatric monopoly, on two counts. First, clinical nurse specialists have been prescribing for some years. Secondly (and this is precisely why the Child Study Center appointment has shaken the profession), while there is no inherent reason why the discipline with the prescription pad should be in charge of academic, bureaucratic or clinical institutions in mental health, psychiatry’s sense of identity depends on having a traditional edge in such intangible products of medical training as authoritativeness and decisiveness as well. Pained comments in this article include two from (psychiatrist) friends of mine. Boston Globe

☯ And here‘s a letter to the editor of the Globe in response to the above article, of particular interest because it is from someone who has trained and practiced as both a psychologist and a psychiatrist. This is exactly the perspective the public needs to disentangle this messy turf war:

“It is frustrating for psychologists to not have access to a prescription pad, but the public’s well-being should not be put at stake in order to mollify that frustration. Psychologists have many other skills they can offer to mental health.

But they are posing very serious health risks to the public by proposing that they, without medical training, should start engaging in the practice of medicine”,

says Dr. John Brenner Levine.

Text of the controversial Harvard commencement address originally titled “My American Jihad” by Zayed Yasin. Thanks to Christopher Anderson, who pointed me to it and noted it is nowhere to be found on Harvard University’s site. It’s actually pretty tame; the overblown turmoil was only about the use of the term ‘jihad’ in the title, on which Yasin relented before delivering the address. BeliefNet

The top 10 search engines according to the top 10 search engines kottke.org [via Walker]

FmH was pointed to today as one of several “worthy liberal blogs” (“The Utne Reader of blogs… always has fascinating and different stuff”) on Winds of Change. This is a relatively new weblog focusing on world affairs by a gentleman, Joe Katzman, who seems to lean toward Sufi wisdom, appears to observe the Jewish Sabbath, and says,

“If you read my blog and think of words like “thoughtful, “iconoclastic,” and “depth”, I’ll know I’ve succeeded.”

He

identifies his politics thusly:

“Cards on the table: I’m a right wing guy. Most people would call me a neo-conservative. In Canada, I support the Canadian Alliance and really like their new leader Stephen Harper. If I lived in the USA, I’d support John McCain. Much of the Blogosphere right now seems to share those views to some extent.”

I’m not sure I agree with his next assertion, that the predominance of right-leaning thought in the weblogging world is part of a struggle to give a disenfranchised political stance a voice. It has often been argued whether the media as a whole have a leftward bias — the conservative accusation — or a rightward tilt — as per progressives. Oh well, if the sense of being disenfranchised juices up the discourse, I’m all for it.

Several months ago, I opined that there seems to be little dialogue between the ‘warbloggers’ and the ‘peacebloggers’, in a fervent reaction to something on UFO Breakfast. At least here is one self-professed ‘neoconservative’ who appears to find something worthwhile in FmH. Thanks for the flattering nod, Joe… [Could that mean he thinks I’m “thoughtful”, “iconoclastic”, and have “depth” too?]

Here’s what Rebecca, coincidentally, has to say on the issue of claims of media bias today:

“Rhetorica is a terrific resource. Go read this wonderful article on Media/Political Bias. It starts with some terrific observations and tools for detecting bias, and it ends with a bang:

Is the news media biased toward liberals? Yes. Is the news media biased toward conservatives? Yes. These questions and answers are uninteresting because it is possible to find evidence–anecdotal and otherwise–to ‘prove’ media bias of one stripe or another.

Far more interesting and instructive is studying the inherent biases of journalism as a professional practice–especially as mediated through television.

Commercial bias…. Temporal bias…. Visual bias…. Bad news bias…. Narrative bias

Take any news story, consider it from those five perspectives, and you’re well on your way to media literacy. Understand and apply everything in the article, and I would consider you to be a master.”

Rebecca’s book on weblogging, by the by, comes out RSN…

Does 20/20 hindsight mean foresight? Signs of attacks well-known:

‘No one wants to believe that the attacks of Sept. 11 could have been prevented, but we do a disservice to our country if we stay in denial. No one wants to believe that President Bush had more forewarning than he acknowledges, but there is strong circumstantial evidence that he did.

Reviewing that evidence on May 26, The Washington Post‘s ombudsman, Michael Getler, alluded to one very telling sign from a conversation between CIA Director George Tenet and former U.S. Sen. David Boren over breakfast on Sept. 11. When an aide rushed up to tell Tenet of the attacks, Tenet’s immediate reaction was: “This has bin Laden all over it. . . . I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training?” ‘ The Miami Herald [thanks, Walker!]

Nuclear Arms Taboo Is Challenged in Japan: “Alarmed by the rising power of China and anxious about the effectiveness of security guarantees from the United States, some of Japan’s most powerful politicians have begun to consider breaking with a half-century-old policy of pacifism by acquiring nuclear weapons.

In comments that stunned many here, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s top aide told reporters last week that what Japan calls its three non-nuclear principles could soon come under review.” NY Times

Probability proves your horoscope correct:

A Nobel prize may not be essential to becoming a modern mystic, but it helps. Georges Charpak, the physics prizewinner in 1992, has co-authored a rapid guide to becoming a fakir or astrologer and making a fortune by bamboozling a gullible public.

His co-author, Henri Broch, who runs a paranormal research unit at Nice University, went through sessions of firewalking and tongue-piercing to prove that all mystic arts were based on trickery, natural circumstances or mathematical probability. Guardian UK

Gunslinger science:

Fifty years ago, it took a Nobel Prize to get the press and public to pay attention to a crank theory like Linus Pauling’s notion that vitamin C could prevent the common cold. But, increasingly, all it seems to require is a degree in some field related to science and an idea off-the-wall enough to make a good headline–and get the attention of well-heeled backers who find your ideas attractive.

One of the pioneers of this branch of gunslinger science was Barry Commoner… Seattle Weekly

Review: The Dream Drugstore by Allen Hobson: “In broad strokes, his claim is that the neurochemistry of dreaming is quite similar to what we find in these other conditions, and that if we can understand the former, then we can also understand the latter. Even if you don’t quite agree with this broad-strokes claim, there is still lots and lots worthwhile in his book to ponder.” Metapsychology

Andrew Weil: Stop the Federal War on Medical Marijuana

Today, in dozens of cities and towns across the United States, something remarkable happened: Thousands of people battling cancer, AIDS and other terrible illnesses, their families, friends and supporters delivered cease-and-desist orders to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to stop it from blocking their access to a needed medication.

Their request was so simple, so obviously correct that it is heartbreaking that people — many very seriously ill — were forced to deliver their message in this way, with many risking arrest. But as individuals who have found that medical marijuana relieves their symptoms when conventional medicines fail, they felt they had no choice: The federal government continues to fight an irrational war against medical marijuana, and the sick and struggling are its principal victims.

Make no mistake: The government’s demonization of marijuana is irrational. When I first published a study in the journal, Science, on marijuana’s physical and psychological effects back in 1968, I was certain that medical use of the plant would be legal within five years. This is, after all, a medicinal plant for which no fatal dose has ever been established and that has been used in folk medicine for millennia. SF Chronicle [via CommonDreams]

Arianna Huffington: Did The Drug War Claim Another 3,056 Casualties On 9-11? CommonDreams

Stupefying Stance on Global Warming: ‘Throwing around words like “fantastic” and “stupefying” is considered bad form outside the tabloid press. But I’m damned if I know what else to say about the news that the Bush administration has decided that global warming is indeed taking place and they are planning to do exactly nothing about it.’ — Molly Ivins, Baltimore Sun [via CommonDreams]

The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat): “Here’s the main thing about The Fast Runner, a strange and memorable movie that comes to us from the Canadian Arctic and is the first feature ever made in Inuktitut, language of the Inuit people: light. I mean, this is one bright movie, all dazzling expanses of ice and snow and sea and sky; the ghostly interiors of igloos by daylight and by firelight. You could read a book by it. It’s a difficult film to follow and at 172 minutes is maybe a half-hour too long. But simply as a sensory experience The Fast Runner (which opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles) is amazing; I can see why some of my critical colleagues have gone gaga for it. In some of its early scenes, those enormous vistas of brilliant white seem to fill up your ears, your nostrils and the inside of your head. It’s like swimming in illuminated milk.” Salon

Trauma lessons: “Young women working as paramedics in Jerusalem divide their lives between bloody mayhem and the rituals of adolescence.” Salon

ReplayTV Users Sue to Skip Commercials: “Owners of ReplayTV Digital Video Recorders have struck back at media empires with a lawsuit that asserts they can zap commercials and swap recorded programs over the Internet without being sued for copyright infringement.” atnewyork.com

Do Dots Connect to Police State?:

The FBI and the CIA would not be replaced by the new agency, but some of their operations could be given over to it. The agency would envelop 22 other federal agencies, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Customs Service, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Border Patrol, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Program, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Secret Service.

…Civil liberty and privacy watchdog groups were grim upon hearing the news, which was only the latest bit of government security tightening to occur in the last couple weeks.

… Several experts have noted that intelligence centrality of the sort proposed by Bush was the main goal of the creation of the CIA — an agency now best known for not letting the FBI know before Sept. 11 that two members of al Qaida had entered the United States. Those men, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, were on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.” Wired

Skakel Convicted in 1975 Beating Death of Greenwich Neighbor New York Times

The world’s flags given letter grades — “Caveat: If you are apt to be offended by sarcastic humour directed towards your national flag, I suggest you go no further.” [via boing boing]

Mozilla 1.0 released after four long years The Register

Dennis Fox, professor of legal studies and psychology at the University of Illinois and a co-founder of the Radical Psychology Network, wrote: Cautions for the Left on Israel and Palestine [a.k.a. “The Shame of the Pro-Palestinian Left”]: :…too many activists on the American left, in their zeal to remedy the Palestinians’ plight, don’t apply principles evenhandedly. I see three overlapping challenges facing the developing movement for Middle East peace and justice…”

Even many of Israel’s long-time supporters now understand that, to provide justice to Palestinians — and to salvage democracy and morality within the Jewish State itself — the thirty-five-year occupation must end. Two weeks ago, to further that goal, American Jewish critics of Israel founded the national Covenant of Justice and Peace, building on the work of older groups around the country. On the other side, a recent call by Palestinian human rights lawyer Jonathan Kuttab and Nonviolence International director Mubarak Awad to transform the Palestinian armed struggle into militant non-violent resistance is attracting growing attention.

So let’s remember that justice and liberation, democracy and safety, can only come about if they come to all of us, together. Let’s not deplore only one side’s racism; or propose remedies that discount one side’s valid needs; or accept the argument that one side has the right to kill uninvolved civilians. Recognition that Israel’s occupation oppresses Palestinians is central. But the justice-based left must seek analyses and solutions built on general principles, and reject those that make new forms of oppression inevitable.

Alexander Cockburn wrote a scathing response, Is criticism of Israel anti-Semitic? “On rhetorical border-grabbing in the media” in Working for Change, a slightly different version of which also appeared in Counterpunch and The Nation. “Over the past 20 years, I’ve learned there’s a quick way of figuring just how badly Israel is behaving. There’s a brisk uptick in the number of articles here by Jews accusing the left of anti-Semitism.” In my opinion (and Fox’s as well), Cockburn sets Fox up as a straw man, ignoring considerable areas of agreement in deserved criticism of Israel in his inimitable, shrill, radicaler-than-thou style. Here is Fox’s rejoinder, Cockburn’s Distorting Lens. The more I read of Cockburn these days, the more I marvel at how he chooses to devote his energies…

Hubble’s NICMOS is back in business: “The revived Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has penetrated layers of dust in a star-forming cloud to uncover a dense, craggy edifice of dust and gas [image at right].” NASA

The real bio-threat:

Currently the United States is experiencing shortages of eight of the eleven vaccines required by law for children: measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), varicella (chicken pox), and pneumococcal disease (meningitis). In response, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have revised their immunization schedule from “optimal” to “some protection,” which means that, depending on the vaccine, kids may get the first shot and not the boosters that solidify immunity, or they may not get the first shot at all until several months past the recommended age. In response to the shortages, some states are relaxing their demands that kids get vaccinated before they come to school this September. In Oregon, for example, seven-year-olds will be allowed to forgo chicken pox shots and diphtheria/tetanus boosters; Texas is deferring the diphtheria/tetanus booster shot required for all 14-year-olds. Which is scary, because children aren’t the only ones at risk: Spotty vaccination cycles for diseases such as rubella and chicken pox mean that children may grow to adulthood without immunity, remaining at risk for diseases that cause many more complications for adults and can have devastating effects for pregnant women. The New Republic

Networking: It’s not just for parties anymore: “Newly discovered principles show the similarity between networks of all kinds — from the Internet to Al Qaeda.” Simson Garfinkel reviews Linked by physicist Albert-László Barabási. CS Monitor

Questionable Quotes (Black Tuesday): Snopes is not sure Bush really uttered the incredible “Do you have blacks, also?” quotation attributed to him by Der Spiegel, in an article to which I blinked, during a meeting with Brazilian president Cardoso. [thanks, David]

Blogging Goes Legit, Sort Of: “Blogging, a latter-day home page for some and a place to pretend

you’re a journalist for others, is now part of a major university’s J-

school curriculum.” Wired

Ghost in the Machine has moved.

Economically Incorrect:

“Last week, ABC officially announced what many industry watchers had expected for several months: The late-night talk show Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher would be canceled, and replaced in the fall by a new entertainment program hosted by Comedy Central’s Jimmy Kimmel. When the news broke, most media reports pegged Politically Incorrect’s demise on Maher’s “unpatriotic” remarks in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Yet while there’s some truth to the notion, this interpretation ignores other, more powerful market forces that have worked to replace an important televised forum of political dissent with the latest incarnation of “must-sleaze” TV.” The American Prospect

“Student Who Heckled Former President Bush in 1998 Must Go to Trial, Texas High Court Rules.” ABC And: “A U.S. Air Force colonel who called President Bush ‘a joke’ and accused him of allowing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to happen because ‘his presidency was going nowhere,’ has been suspended and could face a court-martial.” Sacramento Bee

Self-Annihilating Sentences

US fighter pilots from the squadron that killed four Canadian troops in an April ‘friendly-fire’ mishap had complained of exhaustion to their commander shortly before the fatal accident, after they had misidentified a bombing target during a prior mission (over Iraq, where they were flying sorties over the southern no-fly zone as well as missions over Afghanistan). They asked for more rest, noting that official standards for the interval between missions were not being observed. Their concerns were dismissed and they were told to speak to the flight surgeon about amphetamines. Vancouver Sun

“Blogtank is an experimental team weblog the purpose of which is to determine whether a group of bloggers from various professions and backgrounds can form a new kind of self-organizing consulting group for debate, research and discussion.” Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be anything captivating about it (yet?). Maybe you had to be there (I’m not.).

Don’t get nutty on your loved one. Yahoo! News

Furor over American Muslim student’s Harvard commencement address with buzzword ‘jihad’ in title NY Times

“You want to write a novel about a world ruled by corporations, you’re going to end up naming a few brands. What happens then if you invoice those companies for product placement? Read about author Jim Munroe’s attempts to get some blood from corporate stone.” AdBusters

Found Letters from Kittyville. Some are quite funny, some poignant, some can’t be made heads or tails of.

Lessons From Madness: “Reviews of two books about mental illness: Mad in America by Robert Whitaker and Madness: A Brief History by Roy Porter… Dissimilar in style, approach, and size, the two works are surprisingly complementary. Porter provides a deft examination of how Western cultures from antiquity through modern times have tried to explain and treat insanity, while Whitaker probes in depth the mostly uncaring and usually ineffective way America has treated the “mad.” Here’s the important part about the “dirty little secret” of American medicine:

Though his book is ostensibly about “madness,” Whitaker delves into drug trials. In doing so, he raises broader questions about the “purity” of academic research and peer-reviewed publications, the standard by which the medical profession judges new findings. Whitaker describes how drug testing became part of a new, for-profit drug testing industry, with some community physicians, hit by the new strictures of managed care and looking for ways to supplement their incomes. Traditionally, academic researchers had conducted drug trials, a process that seemed to ensure impartiality since the studies were carefully designed to eliminate any bias. But the process was slow and delays were costly to drugmakers.

The Atlantic

Related: Medical journal statistics potentially “misleading”:

Reports of treatment trials in top international medical journals usually include only the most flattering statistical result, a new analysis reveals. This could mislead doctors and patients into believing a drug or procedure is more effective than it actually is, say researchers at the University of California, Davis.

Jim Nuovo and his team studied all randomised controlled trials with positive treatment results published in the British Medical Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1989, 1992, 1995 and 1998. All 359 papers included the relatively favourable “relative risk reduction” – the percentage difference between the treatment and control group.

But only eight reported the “number needed to treat” – the number of people a doctor would need to treat before the drug prevented a bad outcome, such as stroke, heart attack or death. And only 18 included “absolute risk reduction” – the actual difference between the treatment results compared to the control group. New Scientist

And: Medical press releases may exaggerate results and fail to include study limitations:

Some medical press releases use formats that may exaggerate the perceived importance of findings and do not routinely highlight study limitations, according to DMS researchers in the June 5 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz.

Steven Woloshin, MD, and Lisa M. Schwartz, MD, of Dartmouth Medical School and the White River Junction Veterans Affairs Outcomes Group examined the medical press release process at several high-profile medical journals and reviewed recent releases to evaluate how study findings are presented and whether limitations and potential conflicts of interest are acknowledged.

While medical journals strive to ensure accuracy and the acknowledgment of limitations in articles, press releases may not reflect these efforts, say the authors. EurekAlert

Repaired Space Camera Shows Four-Galaxy Collision: “(A) composite image, released today, from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the collision of four galaxies located 1 billion light-years from Earth and the creation of a torrent of new stars.” NY Times

Weird Sunset: “On June 10, 2002, something extraordinary will happen to the setting Sun

over North America.” NASA

Looking beyond the rhetoric:

“The leaderships on both sides cannot resist playing politics. They cater to certain lobbies or create a camouflage of words to disguise their real intent. President Pervez Musharraf in his speech uses strong words against India essentially to negate an impression that he is giving in to Indian or international pressure on the issue of infiltration. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has been threatening war for some time now without any serious hostile action on the ground. He needs to appear tough to an Indian public angry after terrorist attacks on Parliament and in Jammu. The real action if any is behind the scenes with diplomatic exchanges taking place under the watchful eyes of America.” –Shafqat Mahmood, former Pakistani gov’t official. Rediff.com

Inmate Whose Lawyer Slept Gets New Trial: “The Supreme Court, acting in a case that has come to crystallize arguments over the adequacy of legal representation in death penalty cases, today let stand an appellate ruling that a Texas death row inmate is entitled to a new trial because his lawyer fell asleep repeatedly during his original trial.”NY Times At least he’s still alive for another chance…

More chronicling of intelligence failure in today’s Times. The media are on the bandwagon now, it appears; look for a cascade of this sort of thing with the pending Congressional hearings:

C.I.A. Was Tracking Hijacker Months Earlier Than It Had Said: “The Central Intelligence Agency says in a classified chronology submitted to Congress recently that it picked up the trail of a Qaeda operative who turned out to be a Sept. 11 hijacker months earlier than was previously known, government officials said today.”

A Witness Against Al Qaeda Says the U.S. Let Him Down: “An Egyptian-American pilot who helped prosecutors penetrate Al Qaeda says his life took a harsh turn after he agreed to aid the F.B.I. in its war on terror.”

“Blogtrack is very much a work in progress, but very much done. (It) allows you to check if your favorite websites have been updated …by going to the blogtrack website

or by using blogtrack’s instant messenger interface (for AIM/MSN/ICQ and Yahoo!). It is a free, not-yet open source project which is redundantly alive only to better itself. It is smart about pages with random information/features…”

So God Is Really in the Details? Oxford professor of philosophy Richard Swinburne uses Bayes’ Theorem to prove that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. NY Times [thanks to Richard Homonoff]

Brain injuries from thrill rides LA Times

A New Thinking Emerges About Consciousness:

“The feeling you have as you read this sentence, (Harvard neuroscientist Daniel) Wegner argues, is an illusion pulled off by a complex machine in your skull. It not only reads and understands this sentence, he says, but also makes you feel as if you have experienced the reading of the sentence. In other words, the brain, not content with being a remarkably complex machine, also convinces itself that it isn’t a machine at all.

But why would it bother? The brain, Wegner contends, produces consciousness to give itself a feeling of having done something. This feeling helps the brain recognize similar situations when they arise — the next article in the newspaper, for instance. Being aware of its actions, the brain-machine can better decide whether to read another article.” Washington Post

It’s the cat’s meow: Not language, strictly speaking, but close enough to skillfully manage humans, communication study shows. “Test your fluency in Cat. Click on the cats to hear their meows. One is expressing contentment, the other urgency. Can you tell which is which?”

Incest accusations of the recovered-memory craze tore families apart. Now one of its leaders wants to let bygones be bygones. Review of the new book by co-author of the abuse survivors’ ‘bible’ The Courage to Heal: Thought We’d Never Speak Again: The Road From Estrangement to Reconciliation by Laura Davis Salon

Book review: New British Philosophy: the interviews edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom —

Where have all the philosophers gone? Asked to name a living philosopher, most educated people in Britain might come up with Jacques Derrida. Ask them for something they know about contemporary philosophy, and they might venture the opinion that Derrida is “the one who talks nonsense”. The early 20th century witnessed a bumper crop of great figures such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Less resounding but still significant contributions were made mid-century by the likes of Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, Saul Kripke and others. However, there is little sign of anyone under the age of 40 ready to take their place today. If there are any candidates to emerge in this country, they may well be found in the pages of New British Philosophy, an absorbing collection of interviews with 16 of the nation’s rising stars. Many of them are the right side of middle age and primed to produce their best work. New Statesman

Biologist’s reading of lonely-hearts personal ads reveals what big-city women really want: Men with money. “In densely populated and resource-demanding environments, birds and women may not be all that different.”

Thanks to David Walker for pointing me to this List of American Food Holidays: “Looking to find their niche into the greeting card market, here are some food themed holidays that you should know about.” I’m always looking for another excuse to celebrate…

The World Rock Paper Scissors Society:

“The World RPS Society is dedicated to the promotion of Rock Paper Scissors as a fun and safe way to resolve disputes. We feel that conserving the roots of RPS is essential for the growth and development of the game and the players. The World RPS Society is involved in many areas of the sport, such as; research studies, workshops, tournaments at both local and international levels, book publishing, and much more.”

The site includes a history of RPS, a strategy guide and an online trainer, as well as links to additional RPS resources.

How a Side Effect Might Turn Into Success: interesting story of medical serendipity and biotech ambition — grandiosity? — in its own right, and additionally interesting to me as I went to high school with this guy.

Paul Westerberg reemerges in two-CD Stereo/Mono: ‘Westerberg, 42, hasn’t sounded this carefree, non-attitudinal and delightfully ragtag since 1983’s Hootenanny, one of several cult-beloved albums by his notorious old band the Replacements.’

Following All the Rules in a Close Encounter With a Grizzly: “…The five-minute face-off became painful, she explained in a telephone interview, only after the grizzly released the grip of his jaws, which he had gently clamped on her right thigh.” NY Times I had a similar close encounter with a bear twenty-odd years ago in the Sierras above Yosemite Valley, although fortunately it was not a grizzly…