Dear Sarah: It's not too Late to Start Your Science Education

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I have a sense that Sarah Palin is feeling a twinge of cognitive dissonance these days. I think she knows that she doesn’t possess even rudimentary knowledge about the science issues she comments on (evolution and environmental science, to name two), yet as a figure standing precariously on the edge of right-wing populism, she feels obliged to make one self-assured sounding statement after another. Recall her now famous, “global warming studies based on snake oil science stuff” quote, and her disparaging of fruit fly research in Europe without having any idea what the research was about or why it was important, among others.

Granted, the prerequisite knowledge requirement for the position she occupies is not high; parroting skills are valued more, and those she has in spades. But I want to step back for a moment, ignore ideology and manipulative politics, and openly wonder if Sarah could–if she chose–get the basic science education she is obviously lacking.  I don’t mean go back to school, but rather challenge herself to really investigate the science behind the issues.  I say yes, she could, but with a crucial caveat: she’d have to step away from the podium and really get serious about learning.

Imagine how hard this would be for any public figure whose stock in trade is making endless public appearances, rallying mobs of followers, and putting on the air of impenetrable confidence at all times.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a public figure, of course, but I think it requires so much time, and so strongly colors the mindset of the person in question that genuine learning (the sort that demands self questioning and uncomfortable critique) seldom fits.  The figure would have to be willing to take a vacation from the maelstrom to engage subjects with a perspective even vaguely approaching objectivity.

Maybe I’m giving her more benefit of the doubt than warranted, but a big dose of “doubt” is exactly what I think Sarah needs.  If she stepped away from her firebrand mouthpiece persona and started asking hard questions about these things she dismissively comments on, she might be surprised at what she finds.  And I’ll go even further and say that I think she has enough going on upstairs to make it happen, if a sincere willingness was there–though, regrettably, I doubt it is.

I think instead that she’s found a niche in the vanguard of a political movement that simply doesn’t value science beyond its political utility.  That’s why so many scientists just shake their heads and try the best they can to ignore the political arena. They aren’t elitists, they’re just tired of credible scientific investigation being ignored while politically motivated “science” gets the main stage. Who can blame them for becoming jaded?

In any case, Sarah, if you’re reading, at least consider what I’m telling you. It’s not too late, and you might even enjoy the experience.

Despite its Infamous Reputation, Xanax is Still the Most Prescribed Psychiatric Drug

I came across the graphic below in Good Magazine online. Each pill represents one million psychiatric drug prescriptions. Of the 10 drugs shown, three are benzodiazepines prescribed for anxiety (Xanax, Ativan and Valium), and by far the most prescribed drug of the group is Xanax with 44 million prescriptions in 2009.

What surprises me about this is that of all the benzos, Xanax is the one most often criticized by the psychiatric community for its addictive potential and severe withdrawal effects.

The half life for Xanax is extremely short (6-20 hours) compared to all of the other drugs in its class, and it’s rapidly absorbed by the brain. On the face of it, this seems like a great combination–you get a quick hit of anxiety relief and the drug leaves your system within a 24-hour period. But in practice what often happens is that because the drug acts so quickly and dissipates quickly, the patient begins taking more of it to maintain the effect.  Two pills a day turns into four, which turns into six and on and on.

That’s bad news, but it gets worse.  As more of the drug is absorbed by the brain, the brain reacts by decreasing its production of GABA–the naturally occurring chemical that slows down brain activity when your cerebral gaskets start overheating. With so much of the sedative (Xanax) available, the brain’s efficiency process kicks in and turns down the GABA tap.

So what happens when someone who has been using Xanax daily stops taking it?  The brain doesn’t immediately respond by restoring GABA production to its original level–that process takes time, and during that time withdrawal sets in.  Xanax withdrawal is notoriously painful, and it’s not uncommon for a user to be hospitalized as the symptoms worsen. Even cutting down the dose of the drug can result in withdrawal. Cold turkey is a guaranteed ticket to hell.

With all of that in mind, how is it that so many doctors are still prescribing Xanax?  The answer I’ve heard from a few people in the psych community is simply that “it’s cheap and it works.”  But the same people admit that they’ve frequently seen patients become addicted to it and have a hard time getting them unhooked.  With 44 million prescriptions in the U.S. last year, that’s a lot of probable addiction to a drug infamous for how difficult it is to kick.  In a country where the war on addictive drugs never sleeps, and where a dime bag of pot can earn you a trip to jail, doesn’t this seem like a monumental contradiction?

IBM's Crime Prediction Tech makes Profiling seem like Child's Play

Minority Report wasn’t a great movie, but it did get people talking about what might happen if we actually could predict who was going to commit a crime, perhaps even before the future-perp knew it was going to happen. The movie packaged this possibility in a far-fetched way, involving a hot tub full of comatose people with pre-cognitive abilities plugged into an elaborate pinball machine. How silly.

Thing is, the hard working folks at IBM didn’t think it was so silly. Rather than a mere Hollywood fantasy designed to stoke our fears, predicting crime had “profit center” written all over it for the technology behemoth.  Its Analytics Division has spent more than $12 billion in research and development to gin up a marketable crime prediction software package–and they’ve managed to do exactly that.  Here’s a quote from Deepak Advani, vice president of ‘predictive analytics’ at IBM:

Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide a highly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities by identifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities. It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth of data available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens. Gizmodo, April 14, 2010

The first major government customer for this software was the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom, and now IBM has found a big U.S. customer in the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice. The Department will reportedly use the software to predict which wayward youngsters will commit the next crime, so “interventions” can be implemented post haste.

This story isn’t going to end well.  It begins with statements like the one above from Mr. Advani, peppered with phrases  like “detect patterns” and “make reliable projections”–the sorts of phrases that seem from the get go to promise an eventual infringement of rights, and the inevitable royal screwing of the innocent.   

If you have any doubt just how big a business IBM intends for this to become, check out these numbers from Yahoo Finance, no doubt pulled directly from an IBM press release:

IBM has assembled 4,000 analytics consultants with industry expertise, and opened a network of seven analytics centers of excellence. Today, IBM is working with more than 250,000 clients worldwide on predictive analytics, including 22 of the top 24 global commercial banks, 18 of the world’s top 22 telecommunication carriers and 11 of the top 12 U.S. specialty retailers. Yahoo Finance, April 14, 2010

My reaction to where this all will go is similar to that of Gizmodo writer Jesus Diaz, who sums it up well:

First it’s the convicted-but-potentially-recidivistic criminals. Then it’s the potential terrorists. Then it’s everyone of us, in a big database, getting flagged because some combination of factors—travel patterns, credit card activity, relationships, messaging, social activity and everything else—indicate that we may be thinking about doing something against the law.

Once we get into the business of “predicting” what people will do (for the sake of security, of course) and taking action based on the prediction, we’re on the path to denial of personal liberty.  It’s not a question of if this will happen, but when it will.  And I can’t help but find the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice’s use of the system as especially alarming, since the records of those in its sphere of influence could be forever tainted by information that they have the analytically validated potential to commit a serious crime. “Hey kid, you’re an official security risk for the rest of your life! Good luck with that.”

Add to all of this the potential for abuse of such a system, and there’s more than a little in this news to spark concern in the hearts of the reasonable.

Breaking News: Rush Limbaugh claims Credit for Overthrow of Kyrgyzstan Government

Rush Limbaugh shocked his listeners today by announcing that he had covertly funded and masterminded the overthrow of Kyrgyzstan’s sitting government. “That’s right, I did that,” he proudly told his massive radio audience, adding, “In the U.S., rich white men are nagged by nanny state diversity whores and told that we can’t do this and we can’t do that. This little overthrow was a giant ‘screw you!’ to all of those people.” 

The infamous talk show host sounded smug and assured as he fielded critical questions from a normally adoring audience. When one listener asked how Limbaugh could justify such a heinous action, Limbaugh shouted back, “Heinous? Listen you pinhead, clearly you’re not getting what’s going on in this country. White people can’t do or say anything without being told we’re racists or oppressors. Someone has to show that when push comes to shove, we’ll do whatever the hell we want!  Try to stop us! Now go get a job and stop wasting my time.” 

Another listener challenged Limbaugh more forcefully, stating that he was only proving his critics’ point that he is in fact a dangerously reckless megalomaniac. 

Limbaugh retorted, “I just can’t believe how naïve you are! Open your eyes! Can’t you see that King Obama and his gangs of light and dark skinned followers are infiltrating our institutions and contaminating our precious bodily fluids?  Maybe overthrowing the government of a sovereign nation seems ‘radical’ to your liberal sensibilities, but sometimes the only way to get your message across is to summarily crush people, like we used to before the socialists took over.”  

Limbaugh became especially incensed when a caller suggested that the talk radio giant’s real reason for the Kyrgyzstan overthrow was to take control of the country’s poppy fields.  Pointing to Limbaugh’s well known addiction to Oxycontin, the caller further accused him of lying to cover an ulterior motive that’s anything but noble. 

Limbaugh pounded his fists on the table and yelled back, “Look you jackass, if I want drugs I can get them right here!  I don’t need some goat screwing poppy farmer to get a fix!…I mean, if I was someone who used that stuff, which I’m not, no matter what the left-wing conspiracy theorists say.”     

When asked if he has any plans to visit the country, Limbaugh said that he “wouldn’t be caught dead in that third-world dung hole” and that he “hoped the whole place burns to the ground and is replaced by a new Disney park.”

 

The preceding was entirely fictional. Just Friday funnies. Duh.

Where in America do Bars Outnumber Grocery Stores?

I came across this graphic at the excellent blog, Floating Sheep. It shows the density of bars (red) vs grocery stores (yellow) across the U.S.  You can quite clearly see the “beer belly of America.”

 

Texans Rise Up and Claim Your Independence from Bureaucratic Tyranny!

Having read the news about the Texas Board of Education mandating that history be rewritten in the state’s textbooks, I have only one question: why are Texans putting up with this?  

Allowing a tiny group of elitists posing as populists to make sweeping changes that suit their tastes is entirely antithetical to the character of the most independent-minded state in the nation.

Several of the Board’s changes are ludicrous, but I want to focus on one in particular that should make Texans bristle: demoting Thomas Jefferson from major intellectual influence on the nation’s origins to marginal contributor.  This is an Orwellian truth heist of epic proportions—and Texans shouldn’t let it stand.

Of all the Founding Fathers, Jefferson would likely have been most supportive of Texas’ independent spirit, even to the point of encouraging secession if need be. Consider his quote below:

 “If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation…to a continuance in union… I have no hesitation in saying, ‘let us separate.’ “

Jefferson was an intellectual warrior for liberty who hated tyranny in all its forms. It was Jefferson who pushed forward the radical notion that the colonists had a right to govern themselves—an idea that made many of his counterparts wet their beds. It was Jefferson who imbued the Declaration of Independence with the action-compelling potency that makes it the most consequential document in our nation’s founding. And it was Jefferson who, along with Adams, most fervently supported the peoples’ “Right to revolution” against powers that would deny our freedoms.  

Fast forward to 2010, and the Texas Board of Education has the audacity to demote Thomas Jefferson?  As if they are even fit to critique his words, let alone alter his place in history. They have effectively spit in the face of a man who risked everything to see the vision of freedom come to fruition and allow people like them have a public voice.

What, exactly, has the Texas Board put on the line for America? Other than pursuing their agenda of ignorance, their tyranny of impudence—what can those on this board claim to have given our country?

Further, that this faction on the Texas Board calls themselves “conservatives” is an affront to everyone who rightly deserves the title.  There is nothing conservative about defaming one of our nation’s founders. There is nothing conservative about allowing a skewed political agenda override a dedication to representing the truth about this country’s history. And there is nothing conservative about relegating one of the crucial voices of liberty—without which there may not have been a revolution—to a marginal role simply because you disagree with some of his positions.

Conservative?  Edmund Burke would have lost control of his bowels if told that this group’s actions had anything to do with conservatism. Try Maoism, or maybe Stalinism, but Texas Board, conservatives you are not.  

I don’t live in Texas, but I think everyone who cares about preserving the Founders’ place in American history–and honoring the risk Jefferson and his counterparts took to give us a nation in which free debate is even possible–should be livid about this band of bureaucrats’ reckless actions.

And I think Texans, above everyone else, should be outraged.

Tragic Death of South Korean Baby Shouldn't be used as 'Internet Addiction' Fodder

screenshot of Prius, the game the couple were playing

Horrific news about a South Korean couple neglecting their real child while spending 12 hours a day nurturing a virtual child online is catalyzing worldwide disgust. The couples’ prematurely born 3-month old baby, left in their house alone for hours at a time, eventually died of starvation. The couple was arrested last week after a five-month chase.  

The statistics most often cited in news about this story include “proof”  that South Korea is Internet-obsessed, with more than 70% of the population online, and 96% believing that Internet access is a fundamental right. Plus, Internet cafes are a huge business in South Korea, with many open 24 hours to accommodate broadband insomniacs.

The takeaway from all of this being: the child died because South Koreans are obsessed with living virtual lives, and this is an example of what can happen when people are addicted to the Internet. 

No argument can be made that the death of this child is anything but horrible or that the parents are anything but guilty of neglect in the most extreme sense.  But, using this infant’s death as a way to stoke the fires about Internet addiction is just short of ridiculous.

First, let’s take a look at the statistics allegedly proving that South Korea is dangerously Internet obsessed.  More than 70% of South Korea’s population is online. That’s true. According to the Internet World Stats Usage and Population Statistics, here are a few other countries with comparable online percentages:

Hong Kong: 70%

Singapore: 72%    

Australia: 60%

Canada: 75%

United States: 75%

Andorra: 70%

Iceland: 93%

Liechtenstein: 66%

Monaco: 68%

Norway: 91%

Switzerland: 75%

Austria: 72%

Estonia: 69%

France: 70%

And the list could go on for pages.  The point is that telling us more than 70% of South Koreans are online means relatively nothing. All this tells us is that South Korea is one of several countries from all over the world with 70% or more of their populations using the Internet. 

Next, we’re told that 96% of South Koreans believe using the Internet is a fundamental right. I located the BBC/GlobeScan survey that stat comes from and it appears correct that most Koreans surveyed  “strongly agreed that Internet access is a fundamental right.”  What’s interesting is that so do 94% of Mexicans, a country with only 25% of its population online. And so do 91% of Brazilians, a country with only 35% of its population online. And so do 87% of the Portuguese, with only 42% of the population online.

I suspect we’re told that a high percentage of South Koreans claim Internet access as a right to demonstrate how “addicted” they are—but, as we see again, the statistic means relatively nothing.  According to the survey, countries far less plugged in than South Korea expressed the same opinion.

As to the number of Internet cafes, that’s a more difficult stat to nail down. Wikipedia claims 20,000 cafes in South Korea, which, if correct, is about one per every 2500 residents. Again, I’m not sure what this tells us other than Internet cafes are a booming business in South Korea, as I’m sure they are in any number of countries with comparable Internet usage statistics and high tourism rates.

The two factors are logically linked. South Korea is the 36^thmost traveled-to country in the world, with roughly 7 million tourists visiting every year pumping more than $5 billion into its economy. Many tourists use Internet cafes to stay online when they travel, so we can safely assume much of the Internet café traffic in South Korea is from tourists. But even if that weren’t true, there’s really no compelling point here in favor of the addiction hypothesis.

What this leaves us with is a tragic case of neglect that no one will ever be able to fully explain. But I was pleased to see that Lylah Alphonse, writing in the Boston.com Child Caring blog, sheds light on the tragedy by explaining the cultural influences on the child’s parents. From her post:

According to a 2005 report in the International Journal of Nursing Studies, a six-week study of 50 women in Korea who had given birth to premature infants showed that the new mothers felt “self-blame, concern about the infant, reluctance to express negatives, fear of stigmatizing responses to the infant by others, and delayed joy in mothering.” The reasons were largely cultural: Prematurity is stigmatized because many people there believe that negative thoughts can lead to negative consequences, and that mothers bear responsibility for the condition of their infants at birth. Pregnant women are expected to look only at “beautiful” things in order to have a beautiful child; everything the mother-to-be eats, thinks, feels, or sees is thought to influence the physical characteristics of the baby.

In the virtual world of Prius Online, players choose their careers and the friends, and are rewarded with a child for successfully passing a certain level — a perfect child, with magical powers. The game, which used to be called Anima Online, is a 3-D Real Time Emotional Fantasy game — that is, it’s an alternate reality, one where players can be automatically and effortlessly successful.

In the Internet addiction alarmists’ zeal to use this tragedy as a showpiece (particularly the always alarmist British press), they’ve entirely ignored the cultural factors Alphonse cites above. If the couple didn’t have a virtual world to retreat to, would they have found another way to escape? We’ll never know for sure, but it certainly seems that the shame the young mother experienced for her perceived role in the child being premature would still have been there—and most of the ways people choose to escape shame and guilt have been around far longer than the Internet. 

This tragedy underscores a fact that will become increasingly clear as even more people get online: what someone  brings to the technology will affect the outcome of using the technology. That includes cultural influences, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, impulsiveness, loneliness, poor self esteem, any number of psychological disorders, etc. Most people online will never experience negative outcomes, but a small percentage will.  Sounds a lot like what happens when people use a far more dangerous technology called driving a car. 

And while horrific stories like this make the news, they will always be a tiny fraction of the tragedies occuring around the world every day that have nothing to do with virtual obsessions–most of which we’ll never even hear about.

Born Like This, Into This: Thoughts from a Gen Xer Turning 40, Part 2

The first post in this series is here.

I called the editor of a national college magazine I was writing for at the time and said I wanted to interview the authors of Generations and 13^th Gen. It was 1994, three years after the watershed year when Coupland, Linklater and others kicked off what was fast becoming Gen X’s dubious legacy. I eventually managed to get an interview with author William Strauss, one of the few public supporters Gen X could boast.

Strauss said a couple of things to me in the interview that really resonated and helped ferret out  facts from a landfill of pop media garbage. The first was that Gen X was the most pragmatic of the generations. We gravitated toward what works. Spiritualism and the New Age were fine for mystified enthusiasts, but not for rabidly skeptical pragmatists. Theory was great, but application was vital. Don’t distract me with bunnies in the clouds when there are problems to solve. And the old time religion—we’ll test its medal with a ball-peen hammer and see if it’s still standing when we’re done.

The other thing Strauss said was that Gen X was a reactive generation, and as such it was destined to draw fire from every generation preceding with members still breathing. He sketched a few historical lines to show that all of the reactive generations found themselves in tension with their predecessors. The generation before a reactive generation experienced a “spiritual awakening,” and the reactive generation was determined to challenge it at its foundation.

“Did you ever notice,” he asked me, “how many devil-child movies came out when you were a kid?  Rosemary’s Baby. The Omen. The Exorcist. Carrie. Halloween. Those were responses to your generation being born.” The end of innocence. The spiritual awakening finished. Long before anything pop media threw at us as teens, we’d already been tagged as suspicious in diapers.   

No surprise that as young adults we became reactive–but what exactly were we reacting against? Ideals that failed? Yes. Promises that couldn’t be kept? Sure. Hypocrisy? Definitely. But most of all we were reacting against self-serving delusion.

After WWII, the country was caught up in a flurry of growth, prosperity and baby making.  Then came the Korean War euphemized as a “conflict”; civil rights riots that burned our cities; Great Society programs that shifted debt to future shoulders; and the ultimate anti-delusion, Vietnam. Many of us were born while our parents were watching gory scenes from the war on TV every night. But it wasn’t being born into war that dogged us as much as it was being born into the rude awakening from a two-decade’s long dream of a new America.

Turns out, the new America wasn’t any less overwhelmed with problems than the old America, and Gen X was the generation born into that realization. It would, of course, take the next 15 to 20 years for the realization to emerge in our psyches, just about the time when many of us were in college or getting ready to graduate.

By then, the view outside was bleak. The late 80s and early 90s were a bad time to leave the relatively stable confines of campus. Law schools and MBA programs became bloated with applications, particularly from those of us with liberal arts degrees seeking refuge. In school, we were taken with the world of ideas–not for pure theory’s sake, but because we wanted to apply knowledge to real problems. What pissed many of us off was finding out that most people didn’t really give a shit.

At the same time, those of us who did find employment were stomaching epic levels of flack from our Boomer bosses who seemed convinced that we just didn’t want to work. What they really meant is that we weren’t like them and they couldn’t understand why. To them, we were apathetic whiners who couldn’t hack it in the real world. Pity they had to suffer such insolence.  

I’m not sure how often they realized that the feeling was acutely mutual. Ask most Gen Xers at that time what they thought about the Boomers and you’d likely get a two-word answer: sell outs. To us, the generation that supposedly changed the world seemed mighty content occupying high-salaried positions in corporations they once criticized as flaccid and corrupt. We wanted to remind them that they’d benefited from an enormous post-war boost, and that their success wasn’t achieved in a vacuum. Their short memories made critiquing the upstart underlings convenient, but the truth of the matter wasn’t lost on us.        

Gen Xers looked skeptically upon the Boomers’ penchant for the big sell and thought, “This is what became of the revolution?” If so, who needs it? And collectively, as if a memo went out to millions of people, we shrugged and said, “To hell with it. We’ll figure out our own way and succeed or fail on our own terms.”

And we did. We started businesses, we pioneered non-profits, we moved to the heart of America’s cities and found niches to fill. The Web age was dawning and many of us found our element online. We worked on the first online newspapers, happy to sit in a newsroom all night loading AP wire feeds just to be a part of the action. We worked days and nights pursuing one, two, three start-up projects at a time. The conventions of the workplace didn’t apply—we were fueled by motivations too big for office cube walls. And those of us who were in office cubes often had something going on the side that stoked our passion and made the stale routine of the workplace more bearable.

I’m sure we failed at least as much as we succeeded, probably far more, but the ratio wasn’t important. Doing it was important. Staking our claim was important. Forging a character unique to our prematurely judged generation was important.

All of this was materializing as the country became embroiled in a war for oil. The political climate was growing more contentious. An unsustainable technology bubble was within a few years of bursting and taking a good part of the economy with it. AIDS was picking off twentysomethings with abandon. Life wasn’t becoming less complicated—it was growing more so.     

A few concluding thoughts on this in the next and final post in this series.

Study: An Attractive Partner Boosts Your Hotness

I just came across a study reviewed in LiveScience that suggests your partner’s hotness makes you seem more attractive to the opposite sex.  The results were more true of women than men, who pay attention to attractive women no matter who they’re with. 

From the review:

Scientists had 30 male and 30 female volunteers who all described themselves as straight rate how attractive they found photos of 36 men and 36 women. The volunteers were then shown 144 pictures of men and women paired together and asked how desirable they would find long-term relationships with members of the opposite sex in the pictures.Both male and female volunteers rated people in the pictures as more desirable when they were paired next to attractive companions, the scientists found.

By using cameras to track eye movements during the experiments, the researchers also saw that when volunteers spent more time looking at a potential mate’s unattractive partner, they were less interested in that mate.

Female partners also said they were more skeptical of attractive men if they were with an unattractive partner.

You can find the entire study online here at the open-access journal, PLosONE.

Would You Take a Designer Chair You Saw on the Street?

Video-surveilled designer chairs rigged with GPS devices left on the streets of New York. Sound weird? It’s all part of an experiment conducted by the BluDot Group, and it’s pretty darn interesting.

[vimeovid id=”8201309″]

 

HT: BuzzFeed