Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013
Are mental illnesses such as PMS and depression culturally determined? | Corrinne Burns | Science | guardian.co.uk
Are mental illnesses such as PMS and depression culturally determined? | Corrinne Burns | Science | guardian.co.uk
- Culture-bound syndromes are most often the preoccupation of anthropologists. Typically, the patient displays symptoms that are recognised as indicating a particular illness only by other members of that patient's cultural group. The dhat syndrome observed in parts of India, characterised by fatigue, anxiety and guilt and usually experienced by men, is a well-documented example of a psychological culture-bound syndrome, as is the susto, or fright sickness, of Latin America.
- In a recent editorial in the British Journal of General Practice, Professor Christopher Dowrick ...points out that there is no discrete genetic variation known to cause depression. Rather, there is genetic overlap across a range of mental illness, including depressive disorder, autism and schizophrenia.
- Prof Dowrick's point is that as China and India become politically dominant, spreading different concepts of what constitutes mental illness, we will have to be more sceptical of our cherished diagnostic categories. "In western anglophone societies we have developed an ethic of happiness, in which aberrations ? are assumed to indicate illness," he writes
- ? For sure, no one is arguing than they are not genuine illnesses ? to the patient, the symptoms are real and painful. I used to be convinced by the biomedical model of depression, but now I'm not so sure. Could depression, and other familiar mental conditions, be interpreted as a kind of local language ? our culturally established way of expressing distress and asking for help?
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
Driverless cars, pilotless planes … will there be jobs left for a human being?
While there are plenty of prophecies of impending doom, at least this article lists some of the new possibilities. Especially the growth in "micro", personalized, and personable, services sounds promising. After all, the current winner takes all and monopolizes through scale element of the current system is a major source of unreality (between groups and within, for example with CEO pay), so maybe a more one to one economy would be fairer. Of course would hark back to primitive tradesman, barter days, but this time with an underlying foundation of development.
Extract from article:
Notwithstanding robotisation and automation, I identify four broad areas in which there will be vast job opportunities.
The first is in micro-production. There is going to be a huge growth in micro-brewers, micro-bakers, micro-film-makers, micro-energy producers, micro-tailors, micro-software houses and so on who will deploy the internet and micro-production techniques to produce goods at prices as if they were mass-produced, but customised for individual tastes.
The second is in human wellbeing. There will be vast growth in advising, coaching, caring, mentoring, doctoring, nursing, teaching and generally enhancing capabilities. Medical provision will explode, with replacement organs, skin and limbs opening up new specialisms and industries. Taste, sight and hearing will be vastly enhanced. Ageing will be deferred, with old-age advisers offering advice on how to live well in one's hundreds. Geneticists will open up a live-well economy. Instantaneous language translation will break down language barriers.
The third is in addressing the globe's "wicked issues" . There will be new forms of nutrition and carbon-efficient energy, along with economising with water, to meet the demands of a world population of 9 billion in 2050. Space exploration will become crucial to find new minerals and energy sources. New forms of mining will allow exploration of the Earth's crust. The oceans will be farmed.
And fourthly, digital and big data management will foster whole new industries –personalised journalism, social media, cyber-security, information selection, software, computer science and digital clutter removal.
Doubtless the futurologists can come up with more: the truth is, nobody knows. What we do know is that two-thirds of what we consume today was not invented 25 years ago. It will be the same again in a generation's time. What is different is the pace of change, obsolescence and renewal – and new dangers of extraordinary inequality not just in wages, but in working possibilities.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Conscious computing: how to take control of your life online | Technology | The Guardian
Conscious computing: how to take control of your life online | Technology | The Guardian
- it's not that we've started depending on technology, but that the technology we're depending on is poorly designed, too often focused on making money for its creators at its users' expense. Undoubtedly, we'll one day figure out how to handle cellphones and status updates without the accompanying distraction and compulsion. But that doesn't mean the distraction and compulsion aren't a problem right now ? or that it might not be wise to find ways of adapting more rapidly.
- BF Skinner..conducted famous experiments on pigeons and rats ....discovered that the most powerful way to reinforce the push-or-peck habit was to use "variable schedules of reward": to deliver a pellet not every time the lever was pushed, but only sometimes, and unpredictably.
- There's a slightly depressing view of the web according to which we're essentially just Skinner pigeons, compulsively clicking in hopes of a squirt of dopamine, the so-called "feelgood" hormone in the brain. Once you've learned about Skinner, it's impossible not to see variable schedules of reward everywhere you look online. When you click refresh on your email, or when you check your phone, you're not guaranteed a new message;
- By far the funniest, or maybe the most horrifying, illustration of this situation is Cow Clicker, a Facebook game created in 2011 by the game designer Ian Bogost as a satire of undemanding "social games" such as FarmVille ? in which, as Bogost put it, "you click on a cow, and that's it". In Cow Clicker, you clicked on your cow and it mooed, and that was it: you then had to wait another six hours to click again, unless you were willing to part with real money (or virtual money, accumulated through clicking) for the right to click again immediately. Bogost's joke became a surprise hit: at its height, Cow Clicker had more than 50,000 users, some paying $20 or more for pointless "improvements" to their cow, such as making it face the opposite direction. "After a while," Bogost told a US radio interviewer, "I realised they're doing exactly what concerned me about these games" ? becoming "compulsively attached". "I began to feel very disturbed about the product." Eventually, a few months after the launch, Bogost eliminated all the cows in a Rapture-like event he called the Cowpocalypse. After it, users could keep playing only by clicking on a bare patch of grass ? and some actually did. Responding to a player who complained that Cow Clicker was no longer "a very fun game", Bogost replied, "It wasn't very fun before."
- After all, distraction ? as the Australian philosopher Damon Young points out in his book of that name ? isn't just a minor irritant. It's a serious philosophical problem: what you focus on, hour by hour, day after day, ends up comprising your whole life. "To be diverted isn't simply to have too many stimuli but to be confused about what to attend to and why," Young writes. "Distraction is the very opposite of emancipation: failing to see what is worthwhile in life, and lacking the wherewithal to seek it."
Monday, May 13, 2013
Sunday, May 12, 2013
How to spot a murderer's brain | Science | The Observer
Do your genes, rather than upbringing, determine whether you will become a criminal? Adrian Raine believed so – and breaking that taboo put him on collision course with the world of science
How to spot a murderer's brain | Science | The Observer
What are we to do, for example, Eagleman asked, with the fact that "if you are a carrier of one particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You're three times as likely to commit a robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offence. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1% of death row inmates do… Can we honestly say that the carriers of those genes have exactly the same range of choices in their behaviour as those who do not possess them? And if they do not, should they be judged and punished by the same standard?"
"The sociologist would say if we concentrate on these biological things, or even acknowledge them, we are immediately taking our eyes off other causes of criminal behaviour – poverty, bad neighbourhoods, poor nutrition, lack of education and so on. All things that need to change. And that concern is correct. It is why social scientists have fought this science for so long."
"If we buy into the argument that for some people factors beyond their control, factors in their biology, greatly raise the risk of them becoming offenders, can we justly turn a blind eye to that?" Raine asks. "Is it really the fault of the innocent baby whose mother smoked heavily in pregnancy that he went on to commit crimes? Or if he was battered from pillar to post, or even if he was born with a, abnormally low resting heart rate, how harshly should we punish him? How much should we say he is responsible? There is, and increasingly will be, an argument that he is not fully responsible and therefore, when we come to think of punishment, should we be thinking of more benign institutions than prison?"
But then there is a further thought, that if you start to see criminality as a biological illness, where does a sense of retributive justice stand?
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Michael Gove and 'correct grammar': let me explain this slowly | Michael Rosen
Michael Gove and 'correct grammar': let me explain this slowly | Michael Rosen http://gu.com/p/3fmb8
Friday, May 10, 2013
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Why the politics of envy are keenest among the very rich | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian
Why the politics of envy are keenest among the very rich | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian
- As the immensely rich HL Hunt commented several decades ago: "Money is just a way of keeping score."
- In their interesting but curiously incomplete book, How Much is Enough?, Robert and Edward Skidelsky note that "Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its success, it remains so unloved. It has given us wealth beyond measure, but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of having enough ... The vanishing of all intrinsic ends leaves us with only two options: to be ahead or to be behind. Positional struggle is our fate."
- Four possible conclusions could be drawn. The first is that inequality does indeed encourage people to work harder, as the Skidelskys (and various neoliberals) maintain: the bigger the gap, the more some people will strive to try to close it. Or perhaps it's just that more people, swamped by poverty and debt, are desperate. An alternative explanation is that economic and political inequality sit together: in more unequal nations, bosses are able to drive their workers harder. The fourth possible observation is that the hard work inequality might stimulate neither closes the gap nor enhances social mobility.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Sherry Turkle: 'We're losing the raw, human part of being with each other'
Face to face with the one-time 'cyber-diva' who some now call a 'technophobe'
Sherry Turkle: 'We're losing the raw, human part of being with each other' | Science | The Observer
Friday, May 3, 2013
Risk compensation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Risk compensation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Risk compensation (also Peltzman effect, risk homeostasis) is an observed effect in ethology whereby people tend to adjust their behavior in response to perceived level of risk, behaving less cautiously where they feel more protected and more cautiously where they feel a higher level of risk. The theory emerged out of road safety research after it was observed that many interventions failed to achieve the expected level of benefits but has since found application in many other fields.
Risk compensation (also Peltzman effect, risk homeostasis) is an observed effect in ethology whereby people tend to adjust their behavior in response to perceived level of risk, behaving less cautiously where they feel more protected and more cautiously where they feel a higher level of risk. The theory emerged out of road safety research after it was observed that many interventions failed to achieve the expected level of benefits but has since found application in many other fields.
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