Bugger, I responded to the wrong person, sorry about that.
Medication isn't identical with psychiatric treatment, I think would sum up my objection here. Although I suppose there's no particular argument here, I'm not suggesting (nor was it suggested in my lectures), that people who aren't severely depressed should be taking SSRIs, or anything else for that matter. With hindsight I can see that my initial remark to AC #1 was rather flippant in that respect, which was silly of me.
Besides, the consensus as I knew it was over a decade ago - you'd kinda hope it had changed by now!
I think that's perhaps a rather pessimistic view! Any intervention to the brain, chemical or physical, should not be taken lightly, and those available are not exactly precision tools. The full impacts of SSRIs and other anti-depressants vary substantially between them, not to mention between people and I think that very few people (who aren't idiots, or dubiously motivated) would suggest that they are anything other than a short term, emergency intervention to be used to get people to a place where they can engage in more useful and lasting treatments.
If you can engage without some chemical assistance, then you should be doing that, not getting medicated. (I'm aware that I was a bit casual in my original comment in suggesting AC #1 get medicated.)
(As a side note, I'm more interesting in the potential for ketamine and MDMA as replacements for the role our current anti-depressants play - some of the results in that ballpark have been really quite interesting, but regrettably the legal situation makes it hard to expand that further.)
And one last thing - keeping it a secret seems counter productive, it certainly was for me. (Not to mention, the more people hide mental illness, the more foreign it is and the more people feel they need to hide it.)
I've rambled on again.. I wish you the best of luck, and that sometime you look back and feel you were worth rebuilding!
I'm sure your anecdotal experience trumps mine, is it a particularly useful (or even interesting) dialogue to have though?
I'm not a psychologist, and I would assume my undergraduate courses on abnormal psychology whatnot are out of date (I'd hope so, otherwise progress has been very slow). My criticism of your 'psychiatric treatment for depression is a con bunk' remark relates only to what seems rather an overgeneralisation in saying that since a particular psychiatric treatment didn't work in your case, all psychiatric treatment for that condition doesn't work.
Would it be fair to assume that you're an American (I'm guessing based on the medications)? My understanding is that there's a very different attitude to prescription and diagnosis (particularly of mental illness) in the US, which I'm certainly not familiar with beyond what I read about in the news (generally, that there's massive overmedication).
In any case, perhaps I have offended you, (which really wasn't my intention) in which case I apologise!
I was at the time doing my degree in psychology, the consensus (at least here in the UK), was very clear - SSRIs can be very effective, but only in combination with counselling or something similar. Unfortunately, they don't get used like that. Counselling, and even relatively 'quick fix' type therapies like CBT are staggeringly expensive and time consuming vs. pills. Sadly this means the prescription is the solution option tends to win out.
I do think there's a lot of debate to be had about the efficaciousness of SSRIs in general, they are widely misused and you're quite right to point out that in a lot of cases they really won't help. I also think that the statistical methodology used by pharma to demonstrate their drugs work is misleading at best, and probably outright deceptive (Ben Goldacre has much to say on this subject). However! In this context, I can only offer my anecdotal experience. The greatest benefit to my mental health was certainly not the medication, but the other things I mentioned.
I would take issue with your last statement though - I don't think your assertion is logically sound.
Good for you!
I was extremely leery of anti-depressants, but I suspect without them I would in fact be dead. They made me feel a whole other kind of awful (shakes, nausea, no libido, etc. ad nauseam), but did get me to a point where I could actively work on healing myself, and changing my life to protect me in future. I was able to cope without them after not so long - they should in almost all cases be used like a splint for the brain, and discarded when some semblance of normal neurochemistry is restored.
Hey, AC - go get help, get medicated and use the time you are medicated to do CBT (because the combination of the two has a good success rate), start jogging (because annoyingly, this too has a good success rate), eat more healthily (specific benefits of this are, I believe, a bit more contentious, but cooking properly is a great and positive activity irregardless), and while you're at it, identify what in your life and yourself you need to change to protect yourself from being depressed. Then use that to actually make the changes - this process took me about five years, but became progressively more worth it and easier. There's no magic bullet, it is hard work, and if you are susceptible to depression you probably need to keep at it in a small way forever.
This doesn't work for everybody (some people do seem to just have bad chemistry), and really isn't easy, but it did for me.
Perhaps the hardest bit is actually getting help in the first place, it took me months and the damage to my life was pretty extensive. Then one day I had a breakdown and sat weeping on my kitchen floor, because I couldn't cope with choosing between frozen pies for dinner and thought "Shit, I can't fix this by myself.". A mere three weeks later I'd actually gone to one of the several doctor's appointments I made.
Anyway, I'm rambling. Don't spam your brain - do something about the sadness and pain.
So, with the big flashing red caveat that this is entirely anecdotal and drawn from personal experience, I recall 'spamming' my senses with as many inputs as possible (lying in bed simultaneously listening to music, a film on, reading a book, eating seriously high fat/salt/sugar foodstuffs, etc.) quite a lot while I was in the deeper throes of reasonably severe depression. Retrospectively it seems like an attempt to blot out as much of reality as I could, and drown out the sound of my own thoughts.
Funny things, brains.
Ok, so disregarding TFA, on the basis that the Mail is full of bollocks..
This is actually an interesting thing to do - essentially what they're looking at here is runaway processes. We already have an immediate and pressing one, which they're looking at in the form of climate change. Runaway AI is obviously *not* a problem now, or in the forseeable future, but what is potentially interesting is commonalities between different runaway processes, the ability to identify that something is about to become one, mechanisms to disrupt that and so on.
There's a common thread here with examining conditions under which systems destabilise - Reynold's numbers for things beyond waterflow in pipes, which is definitely an important thing to be thinking about if you're looking at the long-term survival of humanity (let's just assume that this is a good thing..).
Tube: In london the tube is the most expensivepublic transport of the world. To eradicate privacy concerns you are told that you've got no privacy: the tube is covered with cameras. They are there just to easen your feelings of unsecurity and keeping souvenir videos of dead kamikaze bombers for later inspection.
Deceptive at best there - this is (a) from 2007, (b) solely in reference to 'cash fares' which represent something like 4% of tube journeys.
I note the comments are filled with cynicism, sarcasm & general snarking - a not unreasonable approach to any announcement from GSK or any other pharmaceuticals company.
That said - this is potentially a really fantastic thing. New CEO, new game plan. Also worth noting that GSK is the second biggest pharma company in the world - this has a pretty good probability of forcing other large pharma companies to follow suit and opens the door to more of the same (for example, HIV/AIDS drugs are not covered in the patent pooling - this is still a move in the right direction, it will make subsequent moves along the same lines easier.)
Patent pooling is something NGOs have been asking big pharma to do for years now. This is a hugely positive move.
Of course GSK have motives to do this besides doing good, that does not mean doing good is ruled out.
(And I will now be watching the obits for news of Andrew Witty's untimely demise.)
Epic fail.
Apart from anything else, dog is nothing like beef. The meat is closer to venison - much heavier. Tastes good though:)
I can't vouch for roaches, but cicadas mostly taste crunchy. (Issan cooking for the win)
Bit of a bummer, but IP Innovation is a patent troll - which is to say they have no products to infringe patents and are thus immune to the vast patent portfolios of Novell, IBM, OIN etc.
Perhaps if one could patent patent-trolling? Can you patent business methodologies under the whacky-fun US system?
Over here in the UK, I'm a professional geek for a secondary school. We've had this stuff available for a few months now (We run an internal myspace/facebook clone, for example).
Not that we can get the little wretches to make good use of it, but we have it:)
iirc, the premise of Smash Bros is that these are not actually your belov'd Nintendo (and others) characters, the scenario has always been that these are 'trophies', akin to those hero-clix thingies. Hence the 'Hand' bosses (the hands of the child/children who collect them). </po-face>
We had to work this out in a hurry after a sudden decision to buy 70 iMacs - NetRestore saved our butts!
We netboot to restore the OSX image, then simply roll the XP image as a post action. You can then reimage independently using netrestore. (We actually still use ghost for deploying some software, and the rest of our images - NetRestore is faster and easier!)
Our only initial problem was getting the NTFS partition there to roll to, as ntfs-utils (NetRestore uses these to work with the NTFS filesystem) was having none of creating it itself!
In theory you could automate the process entirely if you bypass bootcamp.
Our mac image takes roughly 6 minutes to deploy, in groups of 5-6 over a gig link, and weighs in at about 5 gig, excluding the xp image.
We've been trying to hunt down a Wii since 7 this morning. They're all gone - I passed a half dozen stores, each of which had a very harrased looking person explaining that they'd run out and try back next friday.
As ever, Nintendo launch a new console in the EU to the sound of "Oh for fucksakes! FUCKING NINTENDO EUROPE!!!".
To some extent, I struggle to see why disconnecting from reality is a bad thing. Reality is pretty shoddy in a lot of ways - you can't fly, you can't summon demons, you can't fight dragons, you can't change your physical appearance at whim etc. etc.
Why is attaching to a different reality, or interacting with the same reality through other means, in itself a bad thing? Bill, for all that he is a consumate arse, is probably right about the younger generation disconnecting from reality. So what? We have better alternatives.
At present access to those alternatives generally requires some connection to 'real' reality. They cost money, and most people don't make money doing them. Yet.
Call me when Second Life has haptics and taste/smell. Once that happens, we might start to have serious issues with people reallyreally disconnecting from real reality.
If I wanted an RSS reader, I'd use an RSS reader - if I all I was after was a collated friends page to go with my blog, I'd be right in there with a page that collated the various feeds (as it happens, not all of the blogs people use support RSS/Atom - Myspace, for example [Ew]).
The two way interaction is the kicker - blogging is as much about social networking as it is.. er.. blogging, at this level anyway. I can effectively friend anybody I like, but this is almost meaningless if they can't do the same. Even then I probably can't comment on their blog without having an account with that particular blog provider.
Regretably, this is something only the blog providers can change. Not only that, but it would almost certainly involve them working together. The chances of this are roughly the same of me shagging Linday Lohan in the next four minutes.
But does it support OpenID? Can I maintain a cross blogsite friends list?
Honest question actually - why don't LJ, Blogger et al. allow you to maintain a friends lists across sites, along with an integrated feed of their blogs? I could write a blog app for my site that generated a feed from my friends across sites, but its a bit useless unless you can run it both ways. I could use a blog client that crossposted to several sites - but that's a messy unintegrated solution that just clutters up the net with dupes..
Obviously sites aren't keen on effectively pimping out their competitors, but the arguments here are the same as those for open document formats and cross compatibility in software, unless I'm missing a trick (or a whole magic show)?
Slashdot Mirror
Consider a spherical heavy metal fan..
it just assaults you with science!
The best kind of assault.
Bugger, I responded to the wrong person, sorry about that.
Medication isn't identical with psychiatric treatment, I think would sum up my objection here. Although I suppose there's no particular argument here, I'm not suggesting (nor was it suggested in my lectures), that people who aren't severely depressed should be taking SSRIs, or anything else for that matter. With hindsight I can see that my initial remark to AC #1 was rather flippant in that respect, which was silly of me.
Besides, the consensus as I knew it was over a decade ago - you'd kinda hope it had changed by now!
I think that's perhaps a rather pessimistic view! Any intervention to the brain, chemical or physical, should not be taken lightly, and those available are not exactly precision tools. The full impacts of SSRIs and other anti-depressants vary substantially between them, not to mention between people and I think that very few people (who aren't idiots, or dubiously motivated) would suggest that they are anything other than a short term, emergency intervention to be used to get people to a place where they can engage in more useful and lasting treatments.
If you can engage without some chemical assistance, then you should be doing that, not getting medicated. (I'm aware that I was a bit casual in my original comment in suggesting AC #1 get medicated.)
(As a side note, I'm more interesting in the potential for ketamine and MDMA as replacements for the role our current anti-depressants play - some of the results in that ballpark have been really quite interesting, but regrettably the legal situation makes it hard to expand that further.)
And one last thing - keeping it a secret seems counter productive, it certainly was for me. (Not to mention, the more people hide mental illness, the more foreign it is and the more people feel they need to hide it.)
I've rambled on again.. I wish you the best of luck, and that sometime you look back and feel you were worth rebuilding!
I'm sure your anecdotal experience trumps mine, is it a particularly useful (or even interesting) dialogue to have though?
I'm not a psychologist, and I would assume my undergraduate courses on abnormal psychology whatnot are out of date (I'd hope so, otherwise progress has been very slow). My criticism of your 'psychiatric treatment for depression is a con bunk' remark relates only to what seems rather an overgeneralisation in saying that since a particular psychiatric treatment didn't work in your case, all psychiatric treatment for that condition doesn't work.
Would it be fair to assume that you're an American (I'm guessing based on the medications)? My understanding is that there's a very different attitude to prescription and diagnosis (particularly of mental illness) in the US, which I'm certainly not familiar with beyond what I read about in the news (generally, that there's massive overmedication).
In any case, perhaps I have offended you, (which really wasn't my intention) in which case I apologise!
I was at the time doing my degree in psychology, the consensus (at least here in the UK), was very clear - SSRIs can be very effective, but only in combination with counselling or something similar. Unfortunately, they don't get used like that. Counselling, and even relatively 'quick fix' type therapies like CBT are staggeringly expensive and time consuming vs. pills. Sadly this means the prescription is the solution option tends to win out.
I do think there's a lot of debate to be had about the efficaciousness of SSRIs in general, they are widely misused and you're quite right to point out that in a lot of cases they really won't help. I also think that the statistical methodology used by pharma to demonstrate their drugs work is misleading at best, and probably outright deceptive (Ben Goldacre has much to say on this subject). However! In this context, I can only offer my anecdotal experience. The greatest benefit to my mental health was certainly not the medication, but the other things I mentioned.
I would take issue with your last statement though - I don't think your assertion is logically sound.
The preprint is available, but is still pretty goddamn short.
Good for you!
I was extremely leery of anti-depressants, but I suspect without them I would in fact be dead. They made me feel a whole other kind of awful (shakes, nausea, no libido, etc. ad nauseam), but did get me to a point where I could actively work on healing myself, and changing my life to protect me in future. I was able to cope without them after not so long - they should in almost all cases be used like a splint for the brain, and discarded when some semblance of normal neurochemistry is restored.
Hey, AC - go get help, get medicated and use the time you are medicated to do CBT (because the combination of the two has a good success rate), start jogging (because annoyingly, this too has a good success rate), eat more healthily (specific benefits of this are, I believe, a bit more contentious, but cooking properly is a great and positive activity irregardless), and while you're at it, identify what in your life and yourself you need to change to protect yourself from being depressed. Then use that to actually make the changes - this process took me about five years, but became progressively more worth it and easier. There's no magic bullet, it is hard work, and if you are susceptible to depression you probably need to keep at it in a small way forever.
This doesn't work for everybody (some people do seem to just have bad chemistry), and really isn't easy, but it did for me.
Perhaps the hardest bit is actually getting help in the first place, it took me months and the damage to my life was pretty extensive. Then one day I had a breakdown and sat weeping on my kitchen floor, because I couldn't cope with choosing between frozen pies for dinner and thought "Shit, I can't fix this by myself.". A mere three weeks later I'd actually gone to one of the several doctor's appointments I made.
Anyway, I'm rambling. Don't spam your brain - do something about the sadness and pain.
So, with the big flashing red caveat that this is entirely anecdotal and drawn from personal experience, I recall 'spamming' my senses with as many inputs as possible (lying in bed simultaneously listening to music, a film on, reading a book, eating seriously high fat/salt/sugar foodstuffs, etc.) quite a lot while I was in the deeper throes of reasonably severe depression. Retrospectively it seems like an attempt to blot out as much of reality as I could, and drown out the sound of my own thoughts.
Funny things, brains.
Ok, so disregarding TFA, on the basis that the Mail is full of bollocks..
This is actually an interesting thing to do - essentially what they're looking at here is runaway processes. We already have an immediate and pressing one, which they're looking at in the form of climate change. Runaway AI is obviously *not* a problem now, or in the forseeable future, but what is potentially interesting is commonalities between different runaway processes, the ability to identify that something is about to become one, mechanisms to disrupt that and so on. There's a common thread here with examining conditions under which systems destabilise - Reynold's numbers for things beyond waterflow in pipes, which is definitely an important thing to be thinking about if you're looking at the long-term survival of humanity (let's just assume that this is a good thing..).
Thank you kindly!
Like the rest of the ravening horde trapped in Zuckerberg's basement, I'd love an invite - demonixz at gmail.com.
Tube: In london the tube is the most expensive public transport of the world. To eradicate privacy concerns you are told that you've got no privacy: the tube is covered with cameras. They are there just to easen your feelings of unsecurity and keeping souvenir videos of dead kamikaze bombers for later inspection.
Deceptive at best there - this is (a) from 2007, (b) solely in reference to 'cash fares' which represent something like 4% of tube journeys.
I note the comments are filled with cynicism, sarcasm & general snarking - a not unreasonable approach to any announcement from GSK or any other pharmaceuticals company.
That said - this is potentially a really fantastic thing. New CEO, new game plan. Also worth noting that GSK is the second biggest pharma company in the world - this has a pretty good probability of forcing other large pharma companies to follow suit and opens the door to more of the same (for example, HIV/AIDS drugs are not covered in the patent pooling - this is still a move in the right direction, it will make subsequent moves along the same lines easier.)
Patent pooling is something NGOs have been asking big pharma to do for years now. This is a hugely positive move.
Of course GSK have motives to do this besides doing good, that does not mean doing good is ruled out.
(And I will now be watching the obits for news of Andrew Witty's untimely demise.)
Epic fail. Apart from anything else, dog is nothing like beef. The meat is closer to venison - much heavier. Tastes good though :)
I can't vouch for roaches, but cicadas mostly taste crunchy. (Issan cooking for the win)
Bit of a bummer, but IP Innovation is a patent troll - which is to say they have no products to infringe patents and are thus immune to the vast patent portfolios of Novell, IBM, OIN etc.
Perhaps if one could patent patent-trolling? Can you patent business methodologies under the whacky-fun US system?
Over here in the UK, I'm a professional geek for a secondary school. We've had this stuff available for a few months now (We run an internal myspace/facebook clone, for example).
:)
Not that we can get the little wretches to make good use of it, but we have it
iirc, the premise of Smash Bros is that these are not actually your belov'd Nintendo (and others) characters, the scenario has always been that these are 'trophies', akin to those hero-clix thingies. Hence the 'Hand' bosses (the hands of the child/children who collect them).
</po-face>
*bets on chaos emeralds*
We had to work this out in a hurry after a sudden decision to buy 70 iMacs - NetRestore saved our butts!
We netboot to restore the OSX image, then simply roll the XP image as a post action. You can then reimage independently using netrestore. (We actually still use ghost for deploying some software, and the rest of our images - NetRestore is faster and easier!)
Our only initial problem was getting the NTFS partition there to roll to, as ntfs-utils (NetRestore uses these to work with the NTFS filesystem) was having none of creating it itself!
In theory you could automate the process entirely if you bypass bootcamp.
Our mac image takes roughly 6 minutes to deploy, in groups of 5-6 over a gig link, and weighs in at about 5 gig, excluding the xp image.
First one to compile and run an Eliza program purely by (semantic) googling of blogs and sections of code, wins.
We've been trying to hunt down a Wii since 7 this morning. They're all gone - I passed a half dozen stores, each of which had a very harrased looking person explaining that they'd run out and try back next friday.
As ever, Nintendo launch a new console in the EU to the sound of "Oh for fucksakes! FUCKING NINTENDO EUROPE!!!".
To some extent, I struggle to see why disconnecting from reality is a bad thing. Reality is pretty shoddy in a lot of ways - you can't fly, you can't summon demons, you can't fight dragons, you can't change your physical appearance at whim etc. etc.
Why is attaching to a different reality, or interacting with the same reality through other means, in itself a bad thing? Bill, for all that he is a consumate arse, is probably right about the younger generation disconnecting from reality. So what? We have better alternatives.
At present access to those alternatives generally requires some connection to 'real' reality. They cost money, and most people don't make money doing them. Yet.
Call me when Second Life has haptics and taste/smell. Once that happens, we might start to have serious issues with people reallyreally disconnecting from real reality.
Even then.. would that be a bad thing?
If I wanted an RSS reader, I'd use an RSS reader - if I all I was after was a collated friends page to go with my blog, I'd be right in there with a page that collated the various feeds (as it happens, not all of the blogs people use support RSS/Atom - Myspace, for example [Ew]). The two way interaction is the kicker - blogging is as much about social networking as it is .. er.. blogging, at this level anyway. I can effectively friend anybody I like, but this is almost meaningless if they can't do the same. Even then I probably can't comment on their blog without having an account with that particular blog provider.
Regretably, this is something only the blog providers can change. Not only that, but it would almost certainly involve them working together. The chances of this are roughly the same of me shagging Linday Lohan in the next four minutes.
But does it support OpenID? Can I maintain a cross blogsite friends list? Honest question actually - why don't LJ, Blogger et al. allow you to maintain a friends lists across sites, along with an integrated feed of their blogs? I could write a blog app for my site that generated a feed from my friends across sites, but its a bit useless unless you can run it both ways. I could use a blog client that crossposted to several sites - but that's a messy unintegrated solution that just clutters up the net with dupes.. Obviously sites aren't keen on effectively pimping out their competitors, but the arguments here are the same as those for open document formats and cross compatibility in software, unless I'm missing a trick (or a whole magic show)?