Tag: Premium

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

Charles Darwin, notes David Askew in a review of Paul Johnson’s Darwin: Portrait of a Genius, was not insensitive to the mores of his time:

Darwin’s mechanism [of natural selection] was self-regulating: it could explain the birth of new and the death of old species without having to turn to supernatural causes. It constituted a thorough rejection of the dominant natural theology of the day. Rather than publishing his ideas on the origin of species and the theory of natural selection, however, he sat on them – and maintained a public silence for two decades. This is not surprising. Evolution, [biographers Adrian] Desmond and [James] Moore remind us, was seen by the gentry to be “morally filthy and politically foul”, and Darwin himself acknowledged that to admit to the belief that species are mutable was akin to “confessing a murder”. Desmond and Moore also notice that he was happier “hunting with the urban gentry, rather than running with the radical hounds”.

Darwin did not seek publication until another researcher threatened to eclipse his own findings:

On June 18th, 1858, potential disaster struck. Another reader of [scholar T.R.] Malthus, Alfred Russel Wallace, submitted to Darwin a manuscript describing what Darwin thought was his theory of natural selection: “if Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract!” he moaned in a letter to Lyell. If published, it threatened to deprive him of any claim to originality. He turned to his friends for advice. Lyell proposed a joint publication of Wallace’s paper and extracts from Darwin’s work: both men would share the honour of priority. Darwin himself was reluctant to act dishonourably, but was persuaded that this was a gentlemanly solution. The papers were presented to the Linnean Society in July 1858, and met with silence: as Desmond and Moore say, “no fireworks exploded, only a damp squib”. …

Darwin became serious about publicising his theory: Wallace had finally goaded him into print. [On] The Origin [Of Species], an abstract of the ideas he had been pursuing at leisure, was published by John Murray in November 1859. In many ways the book marks the beginning of a new era in Western history. His ideas had been anathema in Victorian Britain but by the time he died were mainstream opinion: he had transformed long-accepted notions about nature and humanity. One of the remarkable aspects of the Origin is not only how revolutionary the work was, but how quickly its ideas about natural selection and evolution were accepted: here, we see a true paradigm shift. This acceptance is symbolised in the decision to bury the agnostic Darwin in Westminster Abbey.

SCOTUS ruled today that naturally occurring human genes can’t be patented. Lyle Denniston summarizes:

The Supreme Court long ago ruled that an inventor who discovers a phenomenon in nature, or figures out a “law of nature,” cannot get an exclusive right to use or sell that by obtaining a patent from the federal government.  Natural phenomena are the basic tools with which every would-be inventor starts, so locking up the right to use them in a monopoly held by a specific patent owner will frustrate others who might want to look for new ways to interpret that phenomena, the Court has said.

The exclusion of natural substances from eligibility for patents was the theory on which the Court relied Thursday in its unanimous ruling that a company cannot get a patent monopoly on the use and study of human genes that it isolates in the bloodstream, and then takes them out — without changing their natural character — for research.

In a later post, Denniston considers the real-world consequences of the case:

The decision was a major blow to a company that believed it had a right to be the sole user and analyst of two human genes, mutations in which show a high risk, for women found to have them in their blood, of breast and ovarian cancer.  But the ruling will give medical and scientific researchers, and family doctors, greater opportunity to help women patients discover their potential vulnerability to those types of cancer.

In a way, the ruling was a silent tribute to screen actress Angelina Jolie, who recently gained huge notoriety not for her acting but for voluntarily having her breasts surgically removed after discovering that she had the threatening mutations in her body.  She, of course, was able to pay the high cost of that test; now, women of less means will be able to afford it, and that was a key motivation for challenging Myriad’s patent rights.

McArdle frets that SCOTUS “just outlawed the business model of companies like Myriad,” which “spends about $50 million a year on R&D.” She wonders how best to encourage innovation going forward:

One way, of course, is to simply throw more federal money into research grants. Or we could investigate prizes: millions of dollars for anyone who identifies a gene that helps us target a specific disease process. The problem is with setting the value of the rewards—what constitutes a disease process worth targeting, and how do we know when we’ve found a worthwhile connection? Companies have an easy answer to that: “Someone will pay me to test for it.” Governments have to consult more nebulous standards. Investors may not be willing to waste money on those standards—or they may be too willing, because we’ve set the price too high. Or we may simply spend a lot of money on stuff that turns out to not be all that useful.

And, finally, Joshua Keating wonders whether other countries will follow the US’s lead:

In fact, Australia’s Federal Court ruled in favor of Myriad in February after a very similar suit was brought by a cancer foundation there. In that case, the justices ruled that “the two genes, isolated from their natural cells in which they were found, constituted a “manner of manufacture” and could therefore be patented.” That decision is currently being appealed and the government is considering legislation to limit genetic patents.

In Europe, the patentability of genetic materially is legally protected by the EU’s Biotech Directive, which holds that “biological material which is isolated from its natural environment or produced by means of a technical process” may be patentable “even if it previously occurred in nature.”

Earlier Dish on the case here.

Jesse Walker discusses his forthcoming book on conspiracy theories, The United States Of Paranoia:

A point I try to stress in the book is that even a conspiracy theory that says absolutely nothing true about the external world does say something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe it. One example that I mention in the book is the claim that white doctors were deliberately injecting black babies with AIDS. There’s no evidence for that. But while investigating that theory, you can’t stop there. You have to go on to ask, “Why did people believe this was true?”

And in fact, there is this long history of the secretive medical mistreatment of black people, which includes the Tuskegee experiment and all sorts of other things. There were these rumors about night doctors [who would supposedly secretly experiment on African Americans] and it’s really unclear to what extent those were true. Historians who look at this are very cautious, because it’s entirely possible that hospitals were seriously abusing the rights of people from the underclass. We’re trying to piece it together from such incomplete evidence that there’s always going to be question marks. There’s a spectrum that on one end has stuff that’s accepted as historical fact and on the other contains weird fantasies. But these aren’t completely separate categories because there’s this whole realm of possibilities in between.

Despite the difficulties associated with researching the medical effects of cannabis, Colleen Kimmett points to signs of improvement:

“I think it’s inevitable that marijuana will become a prescription medicine,” says [Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’ Rick] Doblin. “It’s just a question of how long we’re going to fight it out as a society.” The fact that the National Institute for Drug Abuse is funding [UC-Davis Dr.] Barth Wilsey’s study is significant. It’s the only trial looking at the potential benefits of cannabis in the institute’s funding history.

With funding direct from NIDA, Wilsey didn’t have to submit his protocol to Human Health Services for approval, eliminating an extra burden of bureaucracy and making for “relatively smooth sailing,” he says.

Wilsey believes one of the reasons his study was funded is because—unlike Doblin—he is looking at a low-THC strain of cannabis, a product that would be presumably less susceptible to diversion by criminal interests. This is intentional, he says, to serve the best needs of his patients. Many are middle-aged, and uninterested in the psychedelic side effects of cannabis. What they do want is relief. And right now, only about half of his patients can find that with conventional prescription drugs. “The science is becoming more robust, and I think we’re going to see more funding,” he says. “As a pain-management therapy, cannabis is effective.”

Allahpundit picks apart the NSA leaker’s reasoning for his latest “revelation” from Hong Kong, about the US hacking China:

The “best-case” scenario for him telling Chinese media that we’re spying on China is that he figures that inflaming local sentiment against the U.S. will make it harder for Chinese/Hong Kong authorities to extradite him. Which is to say, instead of gratuitously humiliating America, in this scenario he’s merely betraying state semi-secrets to protect himself. Somewhere Obama’s watching this CNN clip and smiling because he knows that, like it or not, he’s locked in a battle for public opinion with Snowden right now. And everyone who saw this segment this afternoon is now thinking the same thing: If Snowden’s willing to tell China this, what else is he willing to them that he knows? Advantage: Obama.

Yep, it certainly got my back up. Osnos finds that the Chinese public is warming to Snowden:

Offering details about America’s cyber strategy on China may not help him much in American public opinion, but it already has in China. After initially attracting muted attention during a Chinese holiday earlier this week, by Thursday, his case was major news, and Snowden was a popular man here. Mo Shucao flagged me to an online survey that found that seventy-eight per cent of respondents regarded Snowden as a freedom fighter who protects civil liberties. As for how the Chinese government should handle the case, eighty-one per cent supported giving Snowden asylum either to protect him or extract more of the intelligence he is able to leak. Only three per cent supported surrendering him to the United States.

Adam Minter analyses the Chinese government’s reasons for staying quiet about the leaker for now:

What’s becoming clear is that it’s in China’s best interest that Snowden leave Hong Kong — and soon. No doubt, on Monday there was no small amount of gloating in Beijing at the thought of a former U.S. intelligence analyst contemplating asylum on Chinese territory. But that satisfaction likely gave way to a wary recognition that Snowden is an advocate for digital privacy and against the surveillance state. Whatever benefit he might serve as an intelligence asset, or as a source of national prestige, is outweighed by the prospect of the world’s most famous whistle-blower living out his days in Hong Kong with nothing better to do than turn his attention to the surveillance state across the border.