Month: June 2012

David Nutt spells out the terrible consequences the War on Drugs has had on medical science:

There were six trials of LSD as a treatment for alcoholism, the last one in 1965. The evidence is it's as good as anything we've got, maybe better. But no one is using it for this. I wonder how many other opportunities have been lost in the past 40 years with important drugs, like MDMA (ecstasy) and its empathetic qualities or cannabis for all its possible uses and insights into conditions like schizophrenia. All those opportunities have been wasted because it is virtually impossible to work with a drug when it is illegal.

Yikes:

Amanda Hess wonders why the journalism establishment often worries about its gender problem but ignores its issues with race:

The whiteness of The New York Times Book Review represents the structural inequality of elite journalism stacked on the structural inequality of elite publishing stacked on the structural inequality of income and education in this country. But for women, the system is breaking down at an advanced stage of the game. When female graduates don’t end up in newsrooms, female MFA program stars don’t get book deals, or female editors are not promoted up the chain, publications can be held accountable for that problem. When writers of color are disenfranchised at every stage of the process, everyone is to blame, so no one is.

Douthat seems to think so:

There might be a bipartisan coalition for a relatively limited measure like the Dream Act, which provides a path to citizenship for college graduates who were brought to America as minors. But if Jeb Bush Republicans and Obama Democrats try to fast track a more comprehensive bill, they will be reminded that there are other sorts of Republicans and Democrats, and that bipartisanship cuts both ways. Even if the president wins re-election, the populist coalition that opposes amnesty may still be as large — if not larger — than the elite coalition that supports it.

But the political elites will be looking for a much bigger future coalition than either of these by passing it. It's a no-brainer for Obama's primary non-economic objective in a second term. And for the campaign.

Houman Barekat reviews Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy:

As Fitzpatrick observes, our understanding of authorship is, at the present time, caught between two regimes: one a system of knowledge production informed by Enlightenment-era notions of the self, the other is a world of "technologies that lend themselves to the distributed, the collective, the process-oriented, the anonymous, the remix." As we step into the future increasingly governed by the latter, we move, in some ways, back to an earlier era: a move away from a culture of isolated reading — the individual reader, alone with a book or a screen — towards a more communal engagement, the coffee-house or fireside model of public reading and debate in which literary culture historically originated. Long before print culture, storytelling was not a solitary experience but a group event. So 21st century man, for all the urgent, missionary zeal with which he clogs up his world with cold, impersonal technology, is still just being the same old social animal.

(Sculpture by Jonathan Callan via Colossal)

Greg McKeown relays a tale of Canadian Royal Mounties using positive incentives to deter crime:

[The Mounties'] approach was to try to catch youth doing the right things and give them a Positive Ticket. The ticket granted the recipient free entry to the movies or to a local youth center. They gave out an average of 40,000 tickets per year.

That is three times the number of negative tickets over the same period. As it turns out, and unbeknownst to [Mounty superintendant Ward] Clapham, that ratio (2.9 positive affects to 1 negative affect, to be precise) is called the Losada Line. It is the minimum ratio of positive to negatives that has to exist for a team to flourish. On higher-performing teams (and marriages for that matter) the ratio jumps to 5:1. But does it hold true in policing?

According to Clapham, youth recidivism was reduced from 60% to 8%. Overall crime was reduced by 40%. Youth crime was cut in half. And it cost one-tenth of the traditional judicial system.

 

Sarah Kessler wonders whether interactive video will take off:

[Danfung Dennis's] startup, Condition One, has developed a video player for the iPad and iPhone that gives users some control over how they view a scene. Viewers don’t just passively watch a window as they do with existing players. Rather, they can control video almost as if they are holding the camera. When they pivot or tilt their devices to the right, the video pans to show what they would see if they had turned their heads to the right from within the scene. The same goes for every direction (you can sample the experience with this iPad app).

"As a local GOP official after President Obama’s election, I had a front-row seat as it became infected by a dangerous and virulent form of political rabies. In the grip of this contagion, the Republican Party has come unhinged. Its fevered hallucinations involve threats from imaginary communists and socialists who, seemingly, lurk around every corner. Climate change – a reality recognized by every single significant scientific body and academy in the world – is a liberal conspiracy conjured up by Al Gore and other leftists who want to destroy America. Large numbers of Republicans – the notorious birthers – believe that the President was not born in the United States. Even worse, few figures in the GOP have the courage to confront them.

Republican economic policies are also indefensible.

The GOP constantly claims that its opponents are engaged in "class warfare," but this is an exercise in projection. In Republican proposals, the wealthy win, and the rest of us lose – one only has to look at Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget to see that.

As Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have written, "the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." Its reckless behavior helps drive the political dysfunction crippling our nation.

In the end, it offers a dystopian vision of our future – a harsher, crueler and more merciless America starkly divided between the riders, and the ridden," – Michael Stafford, taking a stand.

The Ballad of the Psychotropic Robots:

"I adore this song and I love growing older with their music.  Do you feel invisible as you age out of the scene, stop being noticed, gradually become less relevant in front of your own eyes? Your favorite places, people, things, they all begin to disappear… they're right, it can be tragic. Again, PSB is right on the money, making me high, bringing me down, writing the soundtrack of my life and of so many in our generation," – a commenter on Youtube.

I feel exactly the same way. It is as if two of the most talented musicians of their generation decided to write a soundtrack for my entire life. And it's still going on. I am a lucky, lucky man.

Maybe not:

These viruses might somehow aid in the growth and development of our metabolisms, or even our organs. Scientists aren't sure, because they haven't had the chance to study a virus-free human population, as they have with the bacteria- and parasite-lacking populations in the West.

(Photo: A plush version of the common cold made by the Giant Microbes company by Flickr user LaMenta3)