Iran election news
If you want to keep up to the minute on the topic of the Iranian election, Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish is offering impressive coverage.
Time to regulate pundits
Joshua Green at The Atlantic thinks it's time to punish pundits who are consistently wrong in their opinions. They should be measured for accuracy and then there should be harsh consequences. Sounds good to me.
Backhanded celebration of homeopathy
It's homeopathic awareness week! Neurologica wants to take full advantage:
According to the British Homeopathic Association . . . June 14-21 is Homeopathy Awareness Week. I would like to do my part to increase awareness of homeopathy. . . I am all in favor of homeopathic awareness. The scientific community should use this week to make the public acutely aware of the fact that homeopathy is, put simply, utter rubbish. Neurologica has put together a detailed account of the world's most over-embellished version of the placebo effect. Consider the homeopathic advocates' arguments for why homeopathic drugs can't be tested:
Many homeopaths have argued that homeopathy cannot be subjected to the same type of studies as are conventional drugs. This is because each patient, from a homeopathic perspective, is unique, and cannot be lumped into a single category. Whereas conventional medicine can compare treatments of 1000 diabetics with two different medications, homeopaths cannot produce large numbers of patients with the same totality of illness requiring the exact same treatment. In making this argument, that of untestability, such homeopaths are securing their position in the halls of pseudoscience, for if their is one single quality which separates scientific theories from nonscientific ones, it is falsifiability. If homeopathic remedies cannot be tested, then they can never be grounded in science.
Neurologica's article is well written and well documented. I agree entirely.Medicating the kids . . .
As a parent, I have participated in many discussions regarding the medication of kids for a variety of reasons. I have friends who have kids with serious problems for whom medication has been a godsend, allowing them to function with relative normalcy. Kids who were unable to participate in a typical classroom for one behavioral issue or another. We've also had many discussions about the problem of over-medicating children, and how some schools push for difficult children to receive behavioral meds, whether they truly need them or not. How some of those adult medications should perhaps not be so quickly prescribed for children. We've talked about education reform, changes in teaching methods and school culture and administrative philosophies that would allow for wider ranges of learning styles. I've heard parents rant about how unfair it is for their well-behaved child to not receive the same level of attention as the "problem kid" in the class commands, and I've seen them answered by the parents of said problem kids with an invitation to trade shoes, just for a day.
Steal this anti-addiction drug!
The April 10, 2009 edition of Science (available online only to subscribers) reports that Naltrexone (a drug used for treating addictions) has been dramatically successful in treating compulsive shoplifting. The relevant study was published in the April 2009 edition of Biological Psychiatry. Sounds like yet more evidence that doing what's "right" is not simply a matter of morality? God, meet Naltrexone . . . This is not to excuse all shop-lifters, but it should make the law-and-order crowd stop to think more seriously about their simplistic views of how to deal with "criminals." Makes me wonder how many other sorts of "criminals" are normal folks struggling with low-level biological issues . . . Here are more examples of low-level processes that drive behavior. At TED, cognitive researcher Nancy Etcoff spells out (starting about 14:00 mark) three lower level systems that underlie reproduction: Lust (sex hormone driven), romantic attraction (dopamine driven) and attachment (oxytocin driven). Etcoff also cites psychologist John Gottman for a good strategy for a happy marriage: make sure that the spouses say at least five positive things for each negative thing. That's how powerful and socially dysfunctional it is to utter negative things.