2013 – Page 914

A Needed Change Of Heart

Alice Park spoke to David Jones about his new book, Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care, and the reasons why bypass surgery and angioplasty aren’t all they’re cracked up to be:

Each intervention, promising lifesaving relief, was embraced with enthusiasm by cardiologists and cardiac surgeons—and both techniques often do provide rapid, dramatic reduction of the alarming pain associated with angina. Yet, as Jones painstakingly explains, it took years to show whether the procedures prolonged lives; in both cases, subsequent research deflated those early hopes. The interventions—major procedures, with potentially significant side effects—provided little or no improvement in survival rates over standard medical and lifestyle treatment except in the very sickest patients. …

“There’ve been focus groups with prospective patients who have stunningly exaggerated expectations of efficacy. Some believed that angioplasty would extend their life expectancy by 10 years! Angioplasty can save the lives of heart-attack patients. But for patients with stable coronary disease, who comprise a large share of angioplasty patients? It has not been shown to extend life expectancy by a day, let alone 10 years—and it’s done a million times a year in this country.”

Kevin Hartnett outlines the reasons we continue to use the procedures:

First, “one of the little dirty secrets of cardiac care” is that until the 1970s, “heart experts could not agree on what was causing heart attacks.” Today, cardiologists believe that “invisible lesions” in the heart vessels—not major artery blockages—are primarily responsible for causing heart attacks. So, in a sense, bypass and angioplasty were grandfathered in as treatments from an era when we didn’t really understand why heart attacks happen.

Second, the popularity of bypass surgery and angioplasty reflects a larger cultural issue with medicine: We overtest and overtreat. Doctors and patients tend to think, “Well, if this procedure could help, let’s do it.” But every surgery comes with risks, of infection, and, in the specific case of bypass surgery, of long-term neurological complications. “It’s important not to do everything that could be done,” Jones told Park.

Art For Government’s Sake

Audrea Lim examines the unusual art scene in the burgeoning city of Chongqing, China:

On its main stretch, Tuya Street, ten-story apartment blocks with shops and eateries on the ground floor have been painted over with cartoon aliens. A three-eyed monster towers over a pharmacy, its mouth full of fangs. A monkey-man in muscle shirt squints down at hipster art students spilling into the road from the side of a building. Another is dotted with black-rimmed, menacing blobs. Down the street, a Lisa Frank-style unicorn poses, five stories tall, amid rainbows and clouds.

“Tuya” means “graffiti” in Chinese—the name is recent—and this street, three-quarters of a mile long, may be the longest stretch of public art in the world. It’s also a government-sanctioned “art district,” centered around the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, which was established in 1940. Huangjueping has been a natural gathering place for Chongqing’s artists ever since, and thanks to its remoteness from Beijing, it has a reputation for producing artists independent of the art establishment.

But as Lim learns, “cheap rent came with non-negotiable obligations, like participating in government-run exhibitions unrelated to their work.” Lim’s conclusion:

It was art propped up by the state in order to burnish the state’s credentials, and fill its coffers—art not for art’s sake, but for the sake of urban development.

(Photo by Drew Bates)

When Big Brother Follows You

The Physics arXiv Blog summarizes a fascinating study of censorship on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo – quite a task given that 70,000 messages are sent per minute:

[Researchers Dan Wallach and company] say that in their data set about 5 percent of the deletions occur within 8 minutes of posting and around 30 percent within 0 minutes. In total, 90 percent of deletions occur within a day, although at times deletions can occur several days later. Those are impressive numbers given the popularity of the microblogging service. How does Weibo manages this task?

Wallach and co say their data point to a number of hypotheses about what’s going on. Since the highest volume of deletions occur within 5-10 minutes of posting, Weibo must be censoring them in near real time. If an average censor can scan around 50 posts a minute, that would require some 1400 censors at any instant to handle the 70,000 posts pouring in. And if they work 8 hour shifts, that’s a total of 4200 censors on the payroll each day.

But automated censorship tools may reduce the number censors. Caitlin Dewey further unpacks the study:

Among the keywords that could trigger a deletion? “Support Syrian rebels,” “lying of government” and “Beijing rainstorms,” the study reports. (The full list does not look thematically different from a list of terms used to filter the Chinese Internet overall, obtained by the Post in 2006.) The rainstorms caused widespread destruction and anti-government outrage in July 2012, and China officially supports the Syrian regime.

The EU’s Porn Show

Today the parliament of the European Union will vote on a resolution to ban pornography, ostensibly to promote gender equality. Zack Beauchamp argues that such a ban would be counterproductive:

[There is] empirical evidence that [pornography] reduces the incidence of sexual violence. One 2007 study by Todd Kendall compared the rates of crime between U.S. states with greater and lesser access to the internet. After controlling for other crime-inducing variables (like rates of urbanization and alcoholism), Kendall found that more internet access led to lower rates of two crimes only — rape and prostitution[.]

Amanda Hess thinks the resolution, which is unlikely to pass, is patronizing:

When we find gender disparities in other sectors—from literary journalism to tech—we urge industry leaders to assess the problem and encourage women to lean in. But when it comes to porn, the impulse is to just shut the whole thing down. That’s unfortunate, because it reinforces the expectation that women can only ever be innocent bystanders to sexual material, never producers or consumers in their own right (banning all porn would mean negating the contributions of proudly feminist pornographers like Tristan Taormino, Nina Hartley, and Cindy Gallop). It glides over the experiences of female porn viewers (who have leveraged the Internet to find and distribute porn that appeals to them, even when it’s not marketed that way). It totally ignores the men who are “sexualized” in porn (if pornography discriminates against women, can we all keep watching gay porn?).

(Photo from the series The Armory by Elizabeth Moran, which “documents the ever-changing sets of the pornography company Kink.com … Devoid of people, the spaces allude to an activity, but leave the viewer to imagine the scene.)

Dollaring Yourself Up

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano connects “our tendency to overvalue fruits of our own labor,” known as the Ikea effect, to beauty routines:

It’s crossed my mind that the Ikea effect might even be part of the larger reason most women wear makeup: The more labor we pour into our “product”—that is, ourselves—the more we value we assign to it. I’m not so cynical as to believe that we think of ourselves as products that can be bought and sold; regardless, our culture certainly shapes women’s value as lying in our appearance, even if we don’t literally translate that into dollars. Put somewhat less cynically, the self-care of beauty work is part of how we physically enact our self-assigned value.

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew contemplated sequestration’s effect on military spending, absolved Israeli forces in the death of a Gaza child, and criticized the worldwide governmental inaction on climate. Elsewhere, he disagreed with TNC on the provenance of racism, cheered Shafer’s take on advertorials while Orwell described them perfectly, solicited the next round of “Ask Andrew Anything” questions.

In political coverage, Paul Ryan selectively accounted for the cost of Obamacare as Justin Green predicted a missed opportunity and we balanced Social Security against Medicare. Kevin Bullis highlighted the greener side of fracking and troubles in the Chinese solar market threatened American installations. Pete Wehner assigned Reagan to the RINO camp, Peter Beinart declared the Bush 2016 campaign DOA, and Rand Paul’s influence rippled outward. While Obama obscured more from the public eye, Hamas and Morsi exasperated each other, and the Guardian traced the history of some haunting images out of Syria.

In assorted coverage, The Economist audited the internet, Frank Abagnale described how modern technology would make him harder to catch, Tim De Chant saw dark clouds on the horizon for US satellites, and Evgeny Morozov explored ethical designs. Nick Holdstock weighed the merging of games and the news, Gregory Ferenstein slimmed down by standing up, and SCOTUS dissected the property rights for GMO seeds. Rachel Kolb filled in the gaps on lip-reading, monsters were nowhere to be found on ancient maps, David Leventi found beauty in dark places, and David Sessions blamed the French’s poor English on Hollywood.

Meanwhile, readers contributed their thoughts on what’s in a name, and argued against polyamory with John Corvino piling on. Garance Franke-Ruta brought Columbia back into the spotlight, women watched from outside the Conclave. Hindus in Indonesia prepared for the Day of Silence in our FOTD, a dance lesson solved racism in the MHB, the SoCal sun peeked through the clouds in the VFYW.

– D.A.

A River Of Death

As Syria degenerates further, the Guardian pieces together “the story behind one of the most shocking images of the war” – 110 civilian corpses washing ashore along the Queiq River in Aleppo:

The concrete ledge from where the bodies were recovered is now covered by waters which, on 29 January, had receded leaving the sodden remains exposed, blood oozing from single bullet wounds to each of their shattered skulls. … “The image of my cousin was horrifying. His face was wrapped with nylon bag and with a tape to make sure he will be dead not only from the bullet but from suffocating. It is heart breaking. Killing Bashar and all of the shabiha won’t be enough revenge.” …

“Before I left the prison, they took 30 people from isolation cells and killed them.” Abdel Rezzaq said he was being held in Block 4, within earshot of the solitary confinement cells and the area where he alleges the prisoners were taken, then executed. “They handcuffed them and blindfolded them and they were torturing them till they died.” “They poured acid on them. The smell was very strong and we were suffocating from it. Then we heard gunshots. The next day they put me and some of the others in front of men with guns, but they didn’t shoot at us. They freed me later that day.”

“I heard women screaming. They were pouring alcohol on us and cursing us. Only God got us out of there, no-one gets out alive. And only god knows what happened to the rest of the people who were in there. I will fight for this cause because I want the whole world to see what is happening.”

Videos and more details here. A more graphic and haunting image after the jump:

(Photos by JM Lopez/AFP/Getty Images)

The GOP’s Favorite Accounting Trick

On Fox News Sunday, Paul Ryan admitted that his new budget will assume Obamacare’s repeal:

Ezra Klein notes that “Ryan’s version of repeal means getting rid of all the parts that spend money to give people health insurance but keeping the tax increases and the Medicare cuts that pays for that health insurance, as without those policies, it is very, very difficult for Ryan to hit his deficit-reduction targets”:

That’s the irony of Ryan’s balanced-budget. Much of it is built on taxes and Medicare cuts that he and his party would never have proposed, and which they in fact fought bitterly, but which they’ve now assimilated into their budget because it’s almost impossible for them to hit their deficit-reduction goals otherwise.

Bernstein calls out the GOP for flipping and flopping on Obamacare’s Medicare cuts.

Shining Light On Solar

VVV at The Economist upends the conventional wisdom on the US/China green-energy trade, noting that in 2011 the US actually exported more solar, wind and smart-grid technology to China than it imported:

One important explanation for this is that while China has strengths in large-scale assembly and mass manufacturing, it lacks the innovation to come up with high-value inputs. So American ingenuity is required to supply Chinese factories with such things as polysilicon and wafers for photovoltaic cells, and the fibreglass and control systems used in wind turbines.

When Chinese solar firm Suntech flirted with bankruptcy last week, Todd Woody explored another wrinkle of the US-Chinese solar relationship:

Look up at a rooftop array in California and it’s likely the solar panels came from China. Between 2007 and 2010, for instance, China’s share of the California market jumped from 2% to 46%. If Suntech and other Chinese companies go bankrupt, warranties on their solar panels will likely become worthless, leaving solar installers like SolarCity liable for any future product failures.

Face Of The Day

Indonesia’s minority Hindu devotees parade their ‘Ogoh Ogoh’ effigies during a ceremony at Jakarta’s central National Monument on March 11, 2013 on the eve of Nyepi or Day of Silence. The effigies symbolizes evil, and after the procession are torched in a symbolic act of destroying all the negative and demonic elements in the universe and will usher in Hindu’s total Day of Silence on March 12. By Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images.