Thanks for the link. A long time ago, I worked in a lab which did a much less sophisticated version of this experiment. They took oligodendrocyte precursor cells (a cell line called 02A), which were genetically engineered to express some kind of easily-seen marker protein (forget which one). The cells were isolated and cultured (which was a pain in the ass to do) from a special breed of non-shiverer mice with the marker protein. Then they were injected into the dorsal columns of shiverer mice, much like in this figure.
From what I recall the results were broadly similar to what these guys achieved. Getting the precursor to differentiate and myelinate nearby axons was not a problem-- they did that on their own. The big problem is that they did NOT proliferate in the spinal column and they did NOT migrate around much. So you would get a little patch of myelinated axons around the injection site, like in figures G and H from the link, but of course the rest of sthe central nervous system was unaffected and it had no effect whatsoever on the shiverer mouse's symptoms or or survival.
The innovation here is that they somehow got skin cells to turn into oligodendrocytes, which is neat. But it doesn't seem to hold much promise as an actual treatment.
My initial reaction to that is 1) Both of those fees are ridiculous, and 2) a competitor could cut those fees in half and put Kickstarter out of business. How complicated is it to run a website like this anyway?
But I'm not a business person, so perhaps someone can explain to me why I'm wrong.
To my surprise, no one is bringing up the real problem here: Patients have a right to be informed about their treatments and about the risks and benefits of each treatment. If you give someone a placebo (outside the context of a medical study) you're deceiving them and that is a breach of medical ethics.
It *is* OK to give a placebo within a medical study, but that's a special circumstance which is governed by very strict rules. One rule is that the patient is fully aware that they are participating in a study and that their treatment is randomized-- they might be assigned a placebo or might be assigned an active drug. There are lots of other rules too (e.g., you can't randomize someone to placebo if there is a proven therapy for the illness they have; instead you have to randomize them to proven therapy vs. experimental therapy. Also, the whole study has to be approved by an institutional review board. Etc.)
The best solution: Foam earplugs, the kind you can buy at a drugstore that are rated for 29 decibels (or something similar), that you wad up and stick well into your ear canal. Combined with a decent pair of headphones (ideally wireless) playing the sounds of a rainstorm.
Actually any white-noise-like sound will work, including actual white noise, a radio tuned to static, crashing waves, etc. For a month or two, I used the Fripp/Eno ambient tune "Wind On Water" playing on an endless loop. Watch your decibel levels-- it doesn't need to be played loud to work.
This setup will drown out the fucking zombie apocalypse.
I've met only a few patients who I thought were true psychopaths, and trust me, I was *very* diplomatic... doesn't pay to ruffle the feathers of a psychopath.
Yeah, there are a lot of these euphemisms and secret acronyms. Some are insulting, and you can theoretically get in trouble for using them, like "FLK"="Funny Looking Kid". Others are merely tactful. "Elevated BMI"=obese. "Supratentorial"=the problem is in the patient's head.
This whole debate about whether patients should see their records-- it's bullshit. Of course they should see their records. Usually if you don't want the patient to see what you're writing, it's either because a) you think the patient's symptoms are psychogenic, and/or b) you think the patient is lying to you, or some combination of the two. But in either of these cases you really ought to tell the patient what you're thinking, diplomatically of course.
Polish jokes were a staple of my childhood, and I like to think it's because they were considered inoffensive-- we didn't really think that being anti-Polish was a thing (we'd never encountered anyone who really hated Poles), so we figured no one was hurt by them. It was like making fun of Belgians, or something.
"Children will learn on their own?"
on
A School in the Cloud
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
From the summary: "One of Mitra's main points is that given resources and a question to ponder, children will learn on their own. Interference and too much direction gets in the way of that."
Well, great. Nobody explained that to the inner-city teenagers I deal with in my clinic. Just about all of them have access to the full resources of the Internet, either at home or down the street at the library. And they are wonderfully free from the evils of "interference and too much direction".
Their general fund of knowledge is shockingly limited. Many of them can't find Europe on a map. A remarkable number of them can't name a single city outside of the United States/Mexico. They struggle with basic arithmetic and reading comprehension.
If you want to see how well-educated a child becomes when you give him "resources" and no direction, just look around you.
"He went to a tiny village in India and put a computer there with software about DNA replication (in English, even though they did not speak or read English). When he came back months later, a group of young children said, 'We don't understand anything — except that mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases.'"
And this is supposed to prove WHAT, exactly? Am I supposed to be impressed by the depth of knowledge that the Indian children achieved?
There's a famous quote by someone-- "If most of us had to sit through a movie of our lives, our main emotions would be boredom and embarassment". That's the first thing I think of whenever this topic is brought up.
The second thing I think of is-- how did I spend my time yesterday, and how would that look on a video? Boredom and embarassment, yes, that seems pretty accurate. (Especially since I'm getting over a cold, and spent most of yesterday blowing my nose and watching Season Five of The Shield).
Which raises an interesting question. How would I have spent yesterday if I knew I was filming it? Would I have goofed off less, and spent more time doing things that are exciting, productive and/or admirable? I don't know. It's hard to believe that knowledge of being filmed wouldn't have had *some* effect on my behavior.
The reason why we would get a world without professional musicians would be that there was a vast surplus of musicians leading to supply massively outstripping demand. Which means we'd have a world with a lot of amateur musicians playing for fun, without pay, because they enjoy doing it. Much like we have today.
To answer the question of what the GP does for a living, one can assume he's doing something that nobody else would do for fun or as a hobby. Probably not trying to be a professional starcraft player or a pro angler. Much like most people who hold paying jobs, making the choice between fun or a paycheck. It's not a question of the value of the work, it's a question of wether the value is available anywhere and everywhere without remuneration or not.
The reaction from 'professional musicians' when Amanda Palmer invited amateurs to play with her on tour locations is an exceptional example of what must be the most spoiled and conceited group of people ever to grace the labour market.
You're correct to say that in a world without professional musicians, there would still be a lot of music to listen to-- and some of it would indeed be great. But let's consider for a moment what else this would mean.
Do you like listening to classical music? Kiss it goodbye. It's simply not possible to play classical music at a world-class level without dedicating yourself to it full time. Itzhak Perlman once remarked that when he misses a day of practice, he can tell that he's not playing as well; when he misses two days, his fellow musicians can tell; and when he misses three days, everyone in the audience can tell.
Got any records at home? How many of them do you think would have been brought into existence if the musicians on them were doing it merely "for fun, without pay, because they enjoyed doing it?"
You mention the Amanda Palmer incident; you may want to read her own comments on the matter, which are more thought-out than your own. Palmer didn't specifically solicit "amateur musicians" for her shows. Instead, she posted ads for musicians (who were expected to perform at a professional level) and offered them "beer and hugs" instead of pay. Her rationale was that-- well, sometimes professional musicians are willing to play for little or no money in return for commercial exposure, she'd done it herself early in her career, and occasionally still did. But she also admitted that she was wrong. She apologized for not thinking things through and promised to compensate her sidemen in the future.
(Part of what irritated everyone about the Palmer incident, of course, was that she has become a well-known and well-compensated artist, who had in fact boasted on her blog about "raising $1,000,000 on Kickstarter faster than any musician in history", and so forth. She's not a struggling artist any more.)
The labor market for musicians has always been tight-- so tight, in fact, that 99% of aspiring musicians will not succeed in paying their rent. The issue here is that in a tight labor market, it's especially important to make sure that the boss is treating you fairly and that there are no middlemen in suits ripping off the modest wages that you are able to command. Read up a bit on the history of record labels.
Neckbeard, it would have been one thing if the poster had written "Most cellists are going to have a tough time making a living... deal with it and stop complaining". Instead the poster wrote "I didn't know that you COULD make a living as a cellist". Which is such a provocatively stupid remark that I'm still not sure he wasn't trolling. (Is it really possible that the OP is unaware of the existence of professional orchestras, quartets, and so on?)
The alternative is to switch to a job that actually pays money. Frankly, she should quit her whining. A cellist? I'm sorry, but she's lucky to be making any money at all. I didn't even know you COULD make money as a cellist.
So, in other words, you would prefer to live in a world in which there are no professional musicians whatsoever? Have you stopped to think for a moment about what such a world might be like?
I wonder what it is that *you* do for a living that is so damn valuable in comparison?
(Sorry, I realize I'm probably being trolled here... but I have a horrible suspicion that perhaps the parent meant what he said.)
Now, wait a minute. Seems to me this isn't bad at all. I don't know that this is "down" from the past at all... in the radio days (not very long ago), 0.1 cents per play would have been a pretty good return.
The key difference is that services like Spotify provide access to specific tracks *on demand*. If I hear a great piece of music on the radio and I want to hear it again/play it for my friends, I'll need to go out and acquire it somehow. If I hear it on Spotify I don't need to do that, because I effectively "own" the song already (albeit in a digital-only, cloud-based format).
In NYC, you have to pay $340 every three years just for the privilege of having a handgun in your own home. In New York State it's $10. Most other states don't charge a dime for you to keep a gun at home. You think a lower middle class family can afford that? At one point, I could not afford that on a paramedic salary.
$340 every three years works out to less than $10/month. I find it hard to believe that you were living in NYC and you couldn't afford $10/month. That being said, it's a stupidly large amount of money for registering a legal weapon. Either it's a we'll-tax-you-because-we-can revenue grab, or it's a legalistic workaround (i.e. they wanted to ban handguns outright, but worried that a ban might be challenged in court, as it was in Chicago).
ECT does in fact work really well in the short term... there's good evidence for that.
There are two deal-breaking problems, though.
1) ECT potentially causes brain damage. For many, many years, nobody did a proper study to check on this. When they finally did the study (long-term followup with neurocognitive testing and a good control group), guess what... it supported the hypothesis that ECT causes brain damage. So much for what my idiot professors told me in school.
2) The effects of ECT are short-lived, and there is *no* evidence that maintenance ECT (giving it every 1-2 months for a period of years) is either safe or effective. Again, nobody bothered to do a study of maintenance ECT for many years, and when they finally got around to doing one, guess what? Efficacy was no better than medications.
Why anyone would think that an anecdotal story about "ECT turning my life around" was scientifically interesting, or worthy of a TED talk, is beyond me. Then again we *are* talking about the f*cking TED talks, which seem to be a magnet for self-important bullshit artists.
It's also a socioeconomic red flag that suggests a lot of confounders: these kids came from the wrong side of the tracks, they've had crappy and neglectful parenting, they've dropped out of school or are on the verge of doing so.
See? That's literally exactly what you said, right down to the x,y, z structure of the statement. The only difference is you used the word suggest rather than imply.
The pronoun "it" in that sentence did not refer to "marijuana use". It referred to *early onset* of *regular* drug or alcohol use.
Obviously that wasn't too clear in my original post (since I've clarified it 3 times now for two different posters), and for that I apologize. Sorry to beat this to death.
Also, please bear in mind that I was simply making a statement about statistical tendencies. In the same vein, I might say "Children in Chicago are statistically less likely than children in San Diego to graduate from high school; they are less likely to obtain a bachelor's-level degree; and they are more likely to be shot to death". This is quite different from stating "If you were born in Chicago, that implies X, Y and Z". Again, the phrasing of my original post may not have made my intended meaning clear.
You are vastly underestimating the prevalence of marijuana use. Check this survey out. 36 percent of high school seniors report having smoked marijuana in the past year, 23 percent in the past month, and 6.5 percent are daily users. These *are* the kids that are taking AP Calc and gunning for the Ivy League.
You are correct that disadvantaged or troubled kids are statistically more likely to be using drugs, but everything you say after "socieconomic red flag" in your original post is so wildy off base it almost seems like you're trolling. Very successful people are regular marijuana users, most of those people started in their teens, and they are not in any way statistical outliers. The idea that a teenager smoking marijuana implies that they had poor parents or are on the verge of failing out of school is absurd.
Bogjobber, you're misrepresenting what I said. I never said that "a teenager smoking marijuana implies X, Y, and Z". I agree that such a statement would be absurd. What I said was much more limited and cautious: "Teenagers who use drugs/alcohol *regularly* at an *early age* are statistically more likely to be disadvantaged or troubled to begin with, and more likely to have brushes with the mental health system". Do you really take issue with that statement?
Listen, Geekoid, you've missed my point. Or perhaps I didn't express it as well as I should have. It might have been clearer if you had also read my earlier post on the topic (which is halfway up the thread now).
My point is that I *don't* think this paper provides any evidence that pot is bad for you. (Just wait and see, though... the media will spin it into another Pot Is Bad headline).
I *do* think that people who start using drugs regularly at an early age are probably more likely to have brushes with the mental health system, and to get diagnosed with a mental illness, than people who don't. (By "early age", I mean onset of use in childhood or adolescence). Here are two hypothetical reasons: 1) Maybe regular drug use is not so good for the child/adolescent brain-- for the brain which is still growing and developing. 2) Maybe kids who regularly get wasted on booze/pills/pot are a more disadvantaged group to begin with. They're statistically less likely to be the ones who are taking AP Calc and gunning for an Ivy League education.
Do I have any proof for hypothesis (1)? No, geekoid, you're right, I don't. It's just an educated guess. But I think it's a reasonable one to live by. I have no problem with an adult who wants to enjoy a beer or a Beaujolais or whatever. But when the time comes, I think I'll tell my kid to hold off on all that stuff until she's of legal age. Hypothesis (2) is probably self-evident.
The citation you gave was an interesting one. It basically argues that hypothesis #2 is important, and that most studies on pot and teenagers do not control for it adequately.
I agree with you, of course, criticism should not be a democracy. (Unless the thing you're criticising is an auto repair shop, or a new laptop, or something).
But I know a good review when I read one. You're discounting the possibility that a talented and hard-working amateur can turn out a good piece of prose.
And I can recognize a bad reviewer, or one whose aesthetic is so contrary to mine that their opinion is irrelevant to me.
Silly example: I know that if I'm reading a restaurant review on "Yelp", and the reviewer uses some variation of the word "yummy" or "yumm-o", that I really don't give a crap what they think about anything.
Sorry for the double post, but I just thought of another important (to me, anyway) objection.
All the pot smokers in the study have one major attribute in common: They started their *regular* drug use *early*-- many of them at age 16 or before. Which frankly, is probably not the best thing for a developing brain. It's also a socioeconomic red flag that suggests a lot of confounders: these kids came from the wrong side of the tracks, they've had crappy and neglectful parenting, they've dropped out of school or are on the verge of doing so.
So it's not especially surprising or interesting to see correlations between early onset of drug use with 'psychosis' and other vague terms of mental disability. You'd expect to see a similar correlation between 'psychosis' and teenage onset of regular beer-drinking.
Wonder if they corrected for SES (socio-economic status). The common causative link may just be chronic unemployment, and growing up in a neighborhood where there is a lot of chronic unemployment and drug use.
Wonder if they corrected for IQ. In my experience, people are often labeled 'psychotic', 'schizophrenic', 'schizoaffective' or whatnot when their main problem is borderline mental retardation. (Mild MR leads to a lot of things that are almost indistinguishable from "schizophrenia". That gives you an idea of the sorry state of our diagnostic system.)
Wonder how well they corrected for concurrent use of other drugs (especially alcohol and cocaine), both in the subjects and in their biological mothers.
Point is, the devil's in the details here. Those details will only be in the journal article (NOT in the article Slashdot posted). I'm too lazy to look it up. Has anyone in this thread looked at it?
Fun fact, crushed up aspirin with some baking soda in a tiny ziplock bag looks a lot like an ounce of crack!
Does that mean being caught posessing one should get you arrested for posessing crack, when in fact, no crack at all is in the bag?
I know it's besides the point, but you *can* be convicted in some states for buying or selling a "lookalike substance"... if the substance is clearly dressed up to look like an illegal drug. Crushed aspirin and baking soda in a tiny ziplock bag would qualify. No idea what the penalties are, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link. A long time ago, I worked in a lab which did a much less sophisticated version of this experiment. They took oligodendrocyte precursor cells (a cell line called 02A), which were genetically engineered to express some kind of easily-seen marker protein (forget which one). The cells were isolated and cultured (which was a pain in the ass to do) from a special breed of non-shiverer mice with the marker protein. Then they were injected into the dorsal columns of shiverer mice, much like in this figure.
From what I recall the results were broadly similar to what these guys achieved. Getting the precursor to differentiate and myelinate nearby axons was not a problem-- they did that on their own. The big problem is that they did NOT proliferate in the spinal column and they did NOT migrate around much. So you would get a little patch of myelinated axons around the injection site, like in figures G and H from the link, but of course the rest of sthe central nervous system was unaffected and it had no effect whatsoever on the shiverer mouse's symptoms or or survival.
The innovation here is that they somehow got skin cells to turn into oligodendrocytes, which is neat. But it doesn't seem to hold much promise as an actual treatment.
Project creators need to include in their budget:
1) Kickstarter's 5%
2) Amazon's 5% (credit card processing)
My initial reaction to that is 1) Both of those fees are ridiculous, and 2) a competitor could cut those fees in half and put Kickstarter out of business. How complicated is it to run a website like this anyway?
But I'm not a business person, so perhaps someone can explain to me why I'm wrong.
To my surprise, no one is bringing up the real problem here: Patients have a right to be informed about their treatments and about the risks and benefits of each treatment. If you give someone a placebo (outside the context of a medical study) you're deceiving them and that is a breach of medical ethics.
It *is* OK to give a placebo within a medical study, but that's a special circumstance which is governed by very strict rules. One rule is that the patient is fully aware that they are participating in a study and that their treatment is randomized-- they might be assigned a placebo or might be assigned an active drug. There are lots of other rules too (e.g., you can't randomize someone to placebo if there is a proven therapy for the illness they have; instead you have to randomize them to proven therapy vs. experimental therapy. Also, the whole study has to be approved by an institutional review board. Etc.)
The best solution: Foam earplugs, the kind you can buy at a drugstore that are rated for 29 decibels (or something similar), that you wad up and stick well into your ear canal. Combined with a decent pair of headphones (ideally wireless) playing the sounds of a rainstorm.
Actually any white-noise-like sound will work, including actual white noise, a radio tuned to static, crashing waves, etc. For a month or two, I used the Fripp/Eno ambient tune "Wind On Water" playing on an endless loop. Watch your decibel levels-- it doesn't need to be played loud to work.
This setup will drown out the fucking zombie apocalypse.
I've met only a few patients who I thought were true psychopaths, and trust me, I was *very* diplomatic... doesn't pay to ruffle the feathers of a psychopath.
Yeah, there are a lot of these euphemisms and secret acronyms. Some are insulting, and you can theoretically get in trouble for using them, like "FLK"="Funny Looking Kid". Others are merely tactful. "Elevated BMI"=obese. "Supratentorial"=the problem is in the patient's head.
This whole debate about whether patients should see their records-- it's bullshit. Of course they should see their records. Usually if you don't want the patient to see what you're writing, it's either because a) you think the patient's symptoms are psychogenic, and/or b) you think the patient is lying to you, or some combination of the two. But in either of these cases you really ought to tell the patient what you're thinking, diplomatically of course.
Polish jokes were a staple of my childhood, and I like to think it's because they were considered inoffensive-- we didn't really think that being anti-Polish was a thing (we'd never encountered anyone who really hated Poles), so we figured no one was hurt by them. It was like making fun of Belgians, or something.
From the summary: "One of Mitra's main points is that given resources and a question to ponder, children will learn on their own. Interference and too much direction gets in the way of that."
Well, great. Nobody explained that to the inner-city teenagers I deal with in my clinic. Just about all of them have access to the full resources of the Internet, either at home or down the street at the library. And they are wonderfully free from the evils of "interference and too much direction".
Their general fund of knowledge is shockingly limited. Many of them can't find Europe on a map. A remarkable number of them can't name a single city outside of the United States/Mexico. They struggle with basic arithmetic and reading comprehension.
If you want to see how well-educated a child becomes when you give him "resources" and no direction, just look around you.
"He went to a tiny village in India and put a computer there with software about DNA replication (in English, even though they did not speak or read English). When he came back months later, a group of young children said, 'We don't understand anything — except that mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases.'"
And this is supposed to prove WHAT, exactly? Am I supposed to be impressed by the depth of knowledge that the Indian children achieved?
There's a famous quote by someone-- "If most of us had to sit through a movie of our lives, our main emotions would be boredom and embarassment". That's the first thing I think of whenever this topic is brought up.
The second thing I think of is-- how did I spend my time yesterday, and how would that look on a video? Boredom and embarassment, yes, that seems pretty accurate. (Especially since I'm getting over a cold, and spent most of yesterday blowing my nose and watching Season Five of The Shield).
Which raises an interesting question. How would I have spent yesterday if I knew I was filming it? Would I have goofed off less, and spent more time doing things that are exciting, productive and/or admirable? I don't know. It's hard to believe that knowledge of being filmed wouldn't have had *some* effect on my behavior.
The women you find at booths are models. This is their chosen profession. Why should you denigrate them for it?
Mod this up! Really, is there anything more to be said?
All scientific papers should be published with a full list of all grant money sources received over the past 24 months.
They are. (In medical research at least, don't know about astrophysics.)
The reason why we would get a world without professional musicians would be that there was a vast surplus of musicians leading to supply massively outstripping demand. Which means we'd have a world with a lot of amateur musicians playing for fun, without pay, because they enjoy doing it. Much like we have today.
To answer the question of what the GP does for a living, one can assume he's doing something that nobody else would do for fun or as a hobby. Probably not trying to be a professional starcraft player or a pro angler. Much like most people who hold paying jobs, making the choice between fun or a paycheck. It's not a question of the value of the work, it's a question of wether the value is available anywhere and everywhere without remuneration or not.
The reaction from 'professional musicians' when Amanda Palmer invited amateurs to play with her on tour locations is an exceptional example of what must be the most spoiled and conceited group of people ever to grace the labour market.
You're correct to say that in a world without professional musicians, there would still be a lot of music to listen to-- and some of it would indeed be great. But let's consider for a moment what else this would mean.
Do you like listening to classical music? Kiss it goodbye. It's simply not possible to play classical music at a world-class level without dedicating yourself to it full time. Itzhak Perlman once remarked that when he misses a day of practice, he can tell that he's not playing as well; when he misses two days, his fellow musicians can tell; and when he misses three days, everyone in the audience can tell.
Got any records at home? How many of them do you think would have been brought into existence if the musicians on them were doing it merely "for fun, without pay, because they enjoyed doing it?"
You mention the Amanda Palmer incident; you may want to read her own comments on the matter, which are more thought-out than your own. Palmer didn't specifically solicit "amateur musicians" for her shows. Instead, she posted ads for musicians (who were expected to perform at a professional level) and offered them "beer and hugs" instead of pay. Her rationale was that-- well, sometimes professional musicians are willing to play for little or no money in return for commercial exposure, she'd done it herself early in her career, and occasionally still did. But she also admitted that she was wrong. She apologized for not thinking things through and promised to compensate her sidemen in the future.
(Part of what irritated everyone about the Palmer incident, of course, was that she has become a well-known and well-compensated artist, who had in fact boasted on her blog about "raising $1,000,000 on Kickstarter faster than any musician in history", and so forth. She's not a struggling artist any more.)
The labor market for musicians has always been tight-- so tight, in fact, that 99% of aspiring musicians will not succeed in paying their rent. The issue here is that in a tight labor market, it's especially important to make sure that the boss is treating you fairly and that there are no middlemen in suits ripping off the modest wages that you are able to command. Read up a bit on the history of record labels.
Neckbeard, it would have been one thing if the poster had written "Most cellists are going to have a tough time making a living... deal with it and stop complaining". Instead the poster wrote "I didn't know that you COULD make a living as a cellist". Which is such a provocatively stupid remark that I'm still not sure he wasn't trolling. (Is it really possible that the OP is unaware of the existence of professional orchestras, quartets, and so on?)
The alternative is to switch to a job that actually pays money. Frankly, she should quit her whining. A cellist? I'm sorry, but she's lucky to be making any money at all. I didn't even know you COULD make money as a cellist.
So, in other words, you would prefer to live in a world in which there are no professional musicians whatsoever? Have you stopped to think for a moment about what such a world might be like?
I wonder what it is that *you* do for a living that is so damn valuable in comparison?
(Sorry, I realize I'm probably being trolled here... but I have a horrible suspicion that perhaps the parent meant what he said.)
Now, wait a minute. Seems to me this isn't bad at all. I don't know that this is "down" from the past at all... in the radio days (not very long ago), 0.1 cents per play would have been a pretty good return.
The key difference is that services like Spotify provide access to specific tracks *on demand*. If I hear a great piece of music on the radio and I want to hear it again/play it for my friends, I'll need to go out and acquire it somehow. If I hear it on Spotify I don't need to do that, because I effectively "own" the song already (albeit in a digital-only, cloud-based format).
In NYC, you have to pay $340 every three years just for the privilege of having a handgun in your own home. In New York State it's $10. Most other states don't charge a dime for you to keep a gun at home. You think a lower middle class family can afford that? At one point, I could not afford that on a paramedic salary.
$340 every three years works out to less than $10/month. I find it hard to believe that you were living in NYC and you couldn't afford $10/month. That being said, it's a stupidly large amount of money for registering a legal weapon. Either it's a we'll-tax-you-because-we-can revenue grab, or it's a legalistic workaround (i.e. they wanted to ban handguns outright, but worried that a ban might be challenged in court, as it was in Chicago).
ECT does in fact work really well in the short term... there's good evidence for that.
There are two deal-breaking problems, though.
1) ECT potentially causes brain damage. For many, many years, nobody did a proper study to check on this. When they finally did the study (long-term followup with neurocognitive testing and a good control group), guess what... it supported the hypothesis that ECT causes brain damage. So much for what my idiot professors told me in school.
2) The effects of ECT are short-lived, and there is *no* evidence that maintenance ECT (giving it every 1-2 months for a period of years) is either safe or effective. Again, nobody bothered to do a study of maintenance ECT for many years, and when they finally got around to doing one, guess what? Efficacy was no better than medications.
Why anyone would think that an anecdotal story about "ECT turning my life around" was scientifically interesting, or worthy of a TED talk, is beyond me. Then again we *are* talking about the f*cking TED talks, which seem to be a magnet for self-important bullshit artists.
The pronoun "it" in that sentence did not refer to "marijuana use". It referred to *early onset* of *regular* drug or alcohol use.
Obviously that wasn't too clear in my original post (since I've clarified it 3 times now for two different posters), and for that I apologize. Sorry to beat this to death.
Also, please bear in mind that I was simply making a statement about statistical tendencies. In the same vein, I might say "Children in Chicago are statistically less likely than children in San Diego to graduate from high school; they are less likely to obtain a bachelor's-level degree; and they are more likely to be shot to death". This is quite different from stating "If you were born in Chicago, that implies X, Y and Z". Again, the phrasing of my original post may not have made my intended meaning clear.
You are vastly underestimating the prevalence of marijuana use. Check this survey out. 36 percent of high school seniors report having smoked marijuana in the past year, 23 percent in the past month, and 6.5 percent are daily users. These *are* the kids that are taking AP Calc and gunning for the Ivy League.
You are correct that disadvantaged or troubled kids are statistically more likely to be using drugs, but everything you say after "socieconomic red flag" in your original post is so wildy off base it almost seems like you're trolling. Very successful people are regular marijuana users, most of those people started in their teens, and they are not in any way statistical outliers. The idea that a teenager smoking marijuana implies that they had poor parents or are on the verge of failing out of school is absurd.
Bogjobber, you're misrepresenting what I said. I never said that "a teenager smoking marijuana implies X, Y, and Z". I agree that such a statement would be absurd. What I said was much more limited and cautious: "Teenagers who use drugs/alcohol *regularly* at an *early age* are statistically more likely to be disadvantaged or troubled to begin with, and more likely to have brushes with the mental health system". Do you really take issue with that statement?
Listen, Geekoid, you've missed my point. Or perhaps I didn't express it as well as I should have. It might have been clearer if you had also read my earlier post on the topic (which is halfway up the thread now).
My point is that I *don't* think this paper provides any evidence that pot is bad for you. (Just wait and see, though... the media will spin it into another Pot Is Bad headline).
I *do* think that people who start using drugs regularly at an early age are probably more likely to have brushes with the mental health system, and to get diagnosed with a mental illness, than people who don't. (By "early age", I mean onset of use in childhood or adolescence). Here are two hypothetical reasons: 1) Maybe regular drug use is not so good for the child/adolescent brain-- for the brain which is still growing and developing. 2) Maybe kids who regularly get wasted on booze/pills/pot are a more disadvantaged group to begin with. They're statistically less likely to be the ones who are taking AP Calc and gunning for an Ivy League education.
Do I have any proof for hypothesis (1)? No, geekoid, you're right, I don't. It's just an educated guess. But I think it's a reasonable one to live by. I have no problem with an adult who wants to enjoy a beer or a Beaujolais or whatever. But when the time comes, I think I'll tell my kid to hold off on all that stuff until she's of legal age. Hypothesis (2) is probably self-evident.
The citation you gave was an interesting one. It basically argues that hypothesis #2 is important, and that most studies on pot and teenagers do not control for it adequately.
I agree with you, of course, criticism should not be a democracy. (Unless the thing you're criticising is an auto repair shop, or a new laptop, or something).
But I know a good review when I read one. You're discounting the possibility that a talented and hard-working amateur can turn out a good piece of prose.
And I can recognize a bad reviewer, or one whose aesthetic is so contrary to mine that their opinion is irrelevant to me.
Silly example: I know that if I'm reading a restaurant review on "Yelp", and the reviewer uses some variation of the word "yummy" or "yumm-o", that I really don't give a crap what they think about anything.
Sorry for the double post, but I just thought of another important (to me, anyway) objection.
All the pot smokers in the study have one major attribute in common: They started their *regular* drug use *early*-- many of them at age 16 or before. Which frankly, is probably not the best thing for a developing brain. It's also a socioeconomic red flag that suggests a lot of confounders: these kids came from the wrong side of the tracks, they've had crappy and neglectful parenting, they've dropped out of school or are on the verge of doing so.
So it's not especially surprising or interesting to see correlations between early onset of drug use with 'psychosis' and other vague terms of mental disability. You'd expect to see a similar correlation between 'psychosis' and teenage onset of regular beer-drinking.
Wonder if they corrected for SES (socio-economic status). The common causative link may just be chronic unemployment, and growing up in a neighborhood where there is a lot of chronic unemployment and drug use.
Wonder if they corrected for IQ. In my experience, people are often labeled 'psychotic', 'schizophrenic', 'schizoaffective' or whatnot when their main problem is borderline mental retardation. (Mild MR leads to a lot of things that are almost indistinguishable from "schizophrenia". That gives you an idea of the sorry state of our diagnostic system.)
Wonder how well they corrected for concurrent use of other drugs (especially alcohol and cocaine), both in the subjects and in their biological mothers.
Point is, the devil's in the details here. Those details will only be in the journal article (NOT in the article Slashdot posted). I'm too lazy to look it up. Has anyone in this thread looked at it?
Fun fact, crushed up aspirin with some baking soda in a tiny ziplock bag looks a lot like an ounce of crack!
Does that mean being caught posessing one should get you arrested for posessing crack, when in fact, no crack at all is in the bag?
I know it's besides the point, but you *can* be convicted in some states for buying or selling a "lookalike substance"... if the substance is clearly dressed up to look like an illegal drug. Crushed aspirin and baking soda in a tiny ziplock bag would qualify. No idea what the penalties are, though.