Month: June 2013

In the case of PTSD sufferers, scientists are undertaking the effort with fascinating results:

Researchers study the mechanisms of fear by testing rats’ abilities to learn to associate ordinarily neutral stimuli, like beeping noises, to unpleasant stimuli, like electric shocks. When researchers condition rats to expect a shock upon hearing beeps, making the beep a “conditioned stimulus,” fear learning is said to have taken place. Likewise, when they learn to dissociate the conditioned stimuli with the shocks, called the “unconditioned stimuli,” this is evidence of fear extinction. …

Dr. Burghardt’s study showed that when rats were treated with an [antidepressant] SSRI called tianeptine, it drastically altered their capacities for fear extinction. Rats that received short-term SSRI treatments—they got the drug for 9 days—developed a greater capacity for fear extinction. Conversely, rats that were treated for 22 days saw their ability to cultivate fear extinction become impaired.

Researchers also noted in the group treated for 22 days a decrease in the amount of a particular receptor protein largely affected by serotonin activity. This suggests that the protein, called the NR2B subunit of the NMDA glutamate receptor, is crucial in mediating the fear responses. Which means that the millions of people taking antidepressants for PTSD may be quashing their ability to successfully instigate fear extinction—and fear learning.

Matthew Ball conducts a lengthy analysis of the economics of Netflix’s recent season of Arrested Development:

I’d argue that it is unlikely that Arrested Development will convince millions of users to stay an extra month in 2014 and 2015. If this is the case, the show would need to achieve its return in the immediate future. Therefore, if we don’t see Netflix adding four to five million new subscribers during the quarter, one of two things are true. One, the show was a poor investment whose draw was a fraction of those anticipated, or two, the show is instead intended to convince many of the million subscribers currently churning away each month to defer their cancellation. This would be telling.

He concludes that Netflix’s original content is less about attracting subscribers, and more about buffering against rising licensing fees for their other content. Felix thinks Ball misunderstands Netflix’s strategy:

[W]hat Ball misses, I think, is that Netflix is playing a very, very long game here — not one measured in months or quarters, and certainly not one where original content pays for itself within a year. Netflix doesn’t particularly want or need the content it produces in-house to make a profit on a short-term basis. Instead, it wants “to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix,” in the words of its chief content officer Ted Sarandos.

Most importantly, the thing that Netflix aspires to, and which HBO already has, is an exclusive library of shows. If everything goes according to plan, then the Netflix of the future will be something people feel that they have to subscribe to, on the grounds that it’s the only place where they can find shows A, B, C, and D. That’s what it means to become HBO — and Netflix is fully cognizant that this is a process which takes many years and billions of dollars.

Harold Pollack feels that deinstitutionalization, “the broad set of policies designed to move individuals with disabilities out of large institutions into family- or community-based settings,” was a mixed bag:

On the whole, deinstitutionalization improved the lives of millions of Americans living with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) — albeit with many exceptions.  These policies allowed people to live with proper support, on a human scale, within their own communities. Second, deinstitutionalization was far less successful in serving the needs of Americans suffering from severe mental illness (SMI) — again, with many exceptions.

He also considers the political power of these groups:

[T]he disparities that prove most damaging for public policy reflect disparities in political standing and social stigma between the two groups. People with intellectual disabilities rank among the most appealing constituencies in America. Their well-organized caregivers — people like me — cross every economic, social, and ideological boundary. I cannot imagine, for example, that a policy akin to the IMD exclusion could be imposed on the intellectually disabled.

Similar differences arise in everyday life, as is obvious to any caregiver. Group homes for the intellectually disabled do not face the same “Not in my backyard” problems that beset similar group homes for people with SMI.  Constrained by stigma and fear, housing facilities for individuals with psychiatric disorders tend to be larger, more clustered within less-desirable neighborhoods. It’s much harder to attract required funds or public acceptance for best-practice SMI interventions.

Keith Humphreys adds “one gloss about the standard by which we judge the effects of deinstitutionalization on people with SMI”:

If we assume that the pitiable man with schizophrenia on the corner would be in a high-quality, safe, well-staffed state mental hospital if only the country hadn’t deinstitutionalized, we are inventing a past that rarely existed. Granted, it may bother the rest of us more that someone is sleeping in their own waste on the street than when the same thing happens in a back ward of an institution, but that’s because only in the former case do we have to look at such suffering, not because the person themselves is necessarily worse off.

Gwynn Guilford spots a connection between television watching in India and the country’s fertility rate:

Over a three-year period, academics Robert Jensen and Emily Oster researched rural villages in five Indian states. They found that once the village got cable TV access, fertility declined within a year (pdf). This has happened elsewhere too. Fertility dropped markedly as more and more Brazilian villages got on the cable grid from 1970 to 1999, according to research by academics Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong, and Suzanne Duryea. …

Though Jensen and Oster’s research in India didn’t focus on the impact of a single type of program, they too conclude that Indian soap operas, which tend to feature independent urban women, might be the critical factor in driving down birth rates. Exposure to TV also tended to accompany a shift in values—fewer rural women who had TV said they found domestic violence acceptable or expressed a preference for male children.

Martin Lewis, who provides the above image, tackled this issue a couple months ago:

As it turns out, the map of television ownership in India does bear a particularly close resemblance to the fertility map. Two anomalously low-fertility states with low levels of female education, Andhra Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, score relatively high on TV penetration, as does West Bengal, which lags on several other important socio-economic indicators.

The correlation is far from perfect: Mizoram ranks higher on the TV chart than its fertility figures would indicate, whereas Odisha and Assam rank lower. Odisha and Assam turn out to be a bit less exceptional in a related but broader and more gender-focused metric, that of “female exposure to media.” These figures, which include a television component, seem to provide the best overall correlation with the spatial patterns of Indian fertility