Armchair Musings
j7uy5 | September 19, 2006The tagline on my old blog was "Observation are gold; hypotheses,
silver; and conclusions, bronze." This reflects my
philosophy, that observation is the fundamental source of all
knowledge. The father you go from your raw observations, the
more likely you are to make a mistake.
To illustrate: When I was about 14, one day my sister came to me and
asked me if I could take some links out of her bicycle chain.
For some perverse reason, I had this habit of trying to make a lesson
out of everything for my little sisters.
I knew that it was possible to remove links, but I also knew that it…
j7uy5 | September 11, 2006All day we've been hearing about the terrorist attacks that took place
on 9/11/2002. We've heard especially from the families of
victims, and from the workers who continue to have health problems.
Some of you probably even listened to our President talk
about 9/11.
Often we hear that 9/11 changed everything. Personally, I do
not think it is true. Yes, it changed everything for the
families of the victims, and for the workers who are having health
problems. But I don't think it changed the course of history.
We were going to attack Iraq regardless. We were going to see
a shift in the…
j7uy5 | September 3, 2006A couple of days ago, I heard this
href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5746173">interview
on NPR, with Steve Inskeep. Inskeep was
interviewing
href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/01/ap/national/mainD8JRRH080.shtml">Spc.
Mark Wilkerson, just before he turned himself in for having
gone AWOL.
Wilkerson served one tour of duty in Iraq, but refused to go back.
He sought CO status, but was told it would take a
long time before his status would be reviewed. Apparently, he
was told to go ahead with his redeployment, and they would let him know
later…
j7uy5 | August 24, 2006There is nothing mystical about the act of understanding.
Sometimes it may seem like it, when one has an Aha! moment,
or when understanding emerges in the context of meditation or spiritual
reflection, but there really is nothing supernatural about it.
Understanding, after all, is merely an act of description. It
arises from the collation of observations.
To understand something is to be able to describe that thing on all
pertinent levels of abstraction. In the case of mental
illness, that means description on levels from the molecular to the
sociocultural. At least at this time. It…
j7uy5 | August 23, 2006In Part I, I gave a brief review of an article in Scientific
American, entitled
href="http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945">The
Expert Mind.
The article described the outcome of research into the mental
processes of expert chess players. The motivation for the
research is to find out how expertise works, to see if there is a
systematic way to develop expertise in a variety of fields.
Perhaps the most important finding in this endeavor is that experts
have developed, through a great deal of practice, an excellent capacity
for pattern…
j7uy5 | August 19, 2006Scientific American has an article in which the
author reviews research into the expertise of chess players.
He ponders the questions of what makes an expert player an
expert, how is the problem-solving strategy of an expert different from
that of a novice, and is there a way to train people to be experts?
What makes this interesting is not so much the questions regarding
chess, in particular; rather, what is interesting is the question of
how generalizable the findings are. The people who study this
question are really interested in the the latter. They
consider chess to be the Drosophila…
j7uy5 | August 10, 2006This is no big surprise, although I did not expect the magnitude of the
effect:
href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/bsj-vaw080806.php">Violence
at work significantly boosts clinical depression riskWork-related violence and threats and the risk of
depression and stress disorders
Employees subjected to real or threatened violence at work run a major
risk of becoming clinically depressed, indicates research in the
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
The magnitude of the risk was in direct proportion to the amount of
workplace violence experienced, the study shows…
j7uy5 | August 5, 2006About 15 years ago, I was giving a lecture on psychiatric medication to
a group of MSW
students. One student asked a question that was intended to
be
provocative. She asked, "how can you justify giving
medication to
treat a problem that is obviously psychological in origin, like
posttraumatic stress disorder?"
What she was referring to, was a paradigm that was commonly held at the
time. Specifically, there was this notion that some problems
were
psychological, and others were biological, in origin. It was
thought, by some, that there was a clear distinction between the two
kinds of…
j7uy5 | August 1, 2006I am at a coffee shop in a far away town, and I have things to do.
So I am not going to write about this extensively at the
moment. Still, while looking for something else, I
encountered this abstract. The title was odd enough to get my
attention.
href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16504418&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum">Psychiatric
agriculture: systemic nutritional modification and mental health in the
developing world.Med Hypotheses. 2006;66(6):1234-9. Epub 2006 Feb 28.London DS, Stoll AL,…
j7uy5 | July 31, 2006When I finished residency, I took a position at a University
clinic north of town. In order to get there, I had to cross a
bridge over a river. I drove over that bridge about 100 times
before the first snowfall.
On the first snowy day, while driving over the bridge, I noticed a
sign. The sign warned that the bridge could be icy.
Prior to that first snowy day, I had not noticed the sign.
Fast-forward to the present day. A
title="Quirky Outtakes" href="http://quirkynomads.com/wpt/">thoughtful
reader
sent a suggestion that I write about the subject of
title="Wikipedia link"
href…
j7uy5 | July 28, 2006This is an archived post from October 2005. It is one of my more whimsical entries, but it does have aserious intent.
The recent National Geographic film,
title="Official movie website"
href="http://wip.warnerbros.com/marchofthepenguins/">March
of the Penguins, has generated a tremendous amount
of controversy: an avalanche of deconstructionism that surely was not
intended by its creator. It seems that the controversy
started when Micheal Medved claimed, in an NYT
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/science/13peng.html?ei=5090&en=36efde9c1de3fa22&ex=1284264000&adxnnl=…
j7uy5 | July 24, 2006This week's Ask-a-ScienceBlogger question is:
If you could have practiced science in any time and
any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?...
Hmmm. I am not going to answer that question, exactly.
Instead, I will rephrase it, and answer the question that I
would like to be asked.
If you could practice science in any time and place in history, for
while, then come back to the present day, where are when
would you pick?
I would like to have been around during the turn of the last two
centuries, in central Europe, as an associate of
title="Wikipedia link" href="Sigmund%…
j7uy5 | July 22, 2006Coturnix
href="http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2006/07/the_perils_of_polls.php">picked
up on an
href="http://www.newsobserver.com/662/story/462624.html">interesting
study, which shows that "Simply asking college students who
are inclined to take drugs about their illegal-drug use in a survey may
increase the behavior." It is a finding that makes
researchers nervous, presumably because they do not want to encourage
such behavior.
It turns out that the effect was only seen in those persons who already
were inclined to use drugs. It seems doubtful that
participating in the survey…
j7uy5 | July 14, 2006A friend and colleague of mine drives around in a cute little VW bug
powered by biodiesel. There's a peace sign on the front of
it, which helps it get better mileage. But peace sign or not,
there has been an ongoing controversy about whether biofuels are worth
anything.
In this post, I provide a little amateur analysis of the whole topic of
biofuels, and comment on the most recent study of the potential
benefits.
The controversy stems from the fact that it takes a lot of energy to
plant, transport, harvest, and process the crops needed to produce
biofuels. Some analyses indicated that…
j7uy5 | July 12, 2006Even though electronic music is all the rage these days, people are
still figuring out new ways to make music without digital intervention.
Samuel Gaudet and Claude Gauthier, mathematicians at the University of
Moncton in New Brunswick, have developed the
href="http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060603/fob7.asp">tritare.
This is like a guitar, but the strings branch in a Y-shape.
This results in the production of nonharmonic overtones,
something typically heard only from percussion instruments.
Meanwhile, at NYU, violinist
rel="tag">Mari Kimura has figured out how to
produce…
j7uy5 | July 5, 2006What do the following have in common: heliocentrism, evolution,
Freudian psychology, and neuroscience? And what does this
have to
do with the controversy about whether nonhuman creatures have emotions?
Pure Pedantry
href="http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2006/06/post_7.php">Do
mice have empathy?
Small Gray Matters
href="http://www.smallgraymatters.com/2006/07/02/the-science-of-empathy-sociology-of-affective-neuroscience/">The
science of empathy & sociology of affective neuroscience
The authors of those blog posts engage in informed speculation about
the existence of empathy…
j7uy5 | July 4, 2006
It's funny how these things work out sometimes. I was reading
an article on the Christian Science Monitor website, about simmering
controversies regarding the religious views of our founding fathers (in
the USA). As I was reading it, it occurred to me that it
might be a good topic for a Skeptic's Circle post. Yesterday,
I had seen a
href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/07/last_call_for_submissions_to_t_1.php">call
for papers posted on Orac's site. So I went there
to find out who is hosting this time, and saw that Orac had already
posted on the same topic that I was…
j7uy5 | July 2, 2006A long time ago,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/about.php">Grrlscientist
href="http://girlscientist.blogspot.com/2005/06/le-scholar-oblige-another-book-meme.html">tagged
me with a meme. So long ago, in fact, that
ScienceBlogs did not even exist. So it may as well have been
in a galaxy far, far, away.
It was a book meme. There were questions like "how many books
do you own." I finished counting several weeks later, and
started to write it out. Then the file was lost in an
unfortunate incident that we do not need to discuss here. I
never got back to reconstructing…
j7uy5 | June 23, 2006What makes a good science teacher? That is the new ask-a-scienceblogger
question. I am sure that there has been a lot of research into this,
none of which I have read. That is why this post is categorized as an
"armchair musing."
I'm going to answer this in a roundabout fashion.
Studies on the effectiveness of psychotherapy have been done, to try to
isolate the variables that predict a successful outcome.
Factors such as age, level of training, gender, gender
matching (whether the patient and the therapist are the same gender),
patient perceptions, therapeutic perspective, years of…
j7uy5 | June 18, 2006
Moose, Isle Royale National ParkNational Park Service Photo,
presumed to be in public domain
Sometimes I am talking to people about how they feel about taking
psychiatric medication. Commonly, they say something like
this: "I would rather be able to do it myself," or, "I don't like being
dependent on something."
Indeed, in American culture (and many others, presumably) independence
is highly valued. It is romanticized. It is
considered to be one of the nobler of virtues. It is
something to boast about.
"I don't need anyone" is a common refrain among the boastful.
Isle Royale…