02.11.08

Long life

Posted in Daily life, Health, Medical, Science at 3:40 pm by LeisureGuy

Interesting, and possibly useful:

A healthy lifestyle during the early elderly years—including weight management, exercising regularly and not smoking—may be associated with a greater probability of living to age 90 in men, as well as good health and physical function, according to a report in the February 11 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. A second article in the same issue finds that although some individuals survive to 100 years or beyond by avoiding chronic diseases, other centenarians live with such conditions for many years without becoming disabled.

Studies of twins have found that about one-fourth of the variation in human life span can be attributed to genetics, according to background information in the article. That leaves about 75 percent that could be attributed to modifiable risk factors.

Laurel B. Yates, M.D., M.P.H., of Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston, and colleagues studied a group of 2,357 men who were participants in the Physician’s Health Study. At the beginning of the study, in 1981 to 1984, the men (average age 72) provided information about demographic and health variables, including height, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels and how often they exercised. Twice during the first year and then once each following year through 2006, they completed a questionnaire asking about changes in habits, health status or ability to do daily tasks.

A total of 970 men (41 percent) lived to age 90 or older. Several modifiable biological and behavioral factors were associated with survival to this exceptional age.

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More on US torture under Bush

Posted in Bush Administration, GOP, Government tagged torture at 2:37 pm by LeisureGuy

Grim. Video below the fold.

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and legal resident of the United Kingdom, was abducted in 2002 by masked men and flown, blindfolded, from Pakistan to Morocco. For 18 months, Mohamed was regularly beaten into unconsciousness by his interrogators. After a scalpel was used to cut into his body, hot, stinging liquid was poured into his wounds.Mohamed is just one victim of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, which the Bush administration has defended openly, yet is now arguing it cannot discuss without endangering national security.

The government is calling for the dismissal of an ACLU lawsuit – brought on behalf of Mohamed and four other rendition victims – against the San Jose Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. for its alleged participation in the rendition program. The Bush administration has intervened in the case and is invoking the “state secrets” privilege to avoid accountability for its illegal torture policies. A hearing on the government’s motion is scheduled for today in San Jose.

The “state secrets” privilege has historically been used to exclude discrete pieces of evidence from lawsuits in order to protect national security, not to throw out entire cases. But the Bush administration has begun to misuse the privilege by routinely waving the “state secrets” flag in an effort to quash lawsuits that might expose its illegal conduct. In addition to this case, the “state secrets” claim has been raised in an effort to throw out other torture and illegal wiretapping suits.

Far from being a “secret,” the rendition program is infamous around the world and has been spoken about repeatedly by government officials. [See video below. - LG]

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The modern madeleine

Posted in Daily life, Medical at 2:31 pm by LeisureGuy

Fascinating:

A 50 year old man, dangerously obese, goes to the hospital for experimental brain surgery to suppress his appetite. A small piece of his skull is removed, and an electrical probe inserted deep into his brain tissue. It reaches his hypothalamus and current is switched on. Suddenly the patient — awake through the procedure — begins to speak uncontrollably about events in his past, events he had long forgotten. He remembers a day’s walk in the park 30 years ago, complete with what people were wearing, all in vivid color. He sees them speaking to him, every motion they made. The intensity and level of detail of the memories is frightening.

The scene may read like the script of a bad science fiction flick but it comes from an unidentified patient at Ontario’s Toronto Western Hospital. No one was more astonished than the man’s doctors, who began to experiment further on him. Over the next few weeks, they continued testing. His ability to both learn and remember was substantially increased when the electrodes were turned on. Continuous stimulation also had a residual effect — after the electrodes were off, there was still a slight benefit.

Professor Andreas Lozano, of the Neurosurgery Department of Toronto Western, led the research. He says the electrodes function like “turning up the volume” on the brain’s memory circuits. “As we turned the current up, we first drove his memory circuits and improved his learning. As we increased the intensity, we got spontaneous memories of discrete events. At a certain intensity, he would slash to the [park scene]. When the intensity was increased further, he got more detail but, when the current was turned off, it rapidly decayed.”

Lozano’s previous research included stimulating certain portions of the brain to curb appetite. His research in that field earned him more than a few headlines in 2006.
The results were so successful the same technique is now being trialed on six Alzheimer’s patients. Functioning like a “pacemaker for the brain,” the treatment offers hope for the millions worldwide who suffer from the debilitating memory and cognitive losses caused by Alzheimer’s.

The electrodes are connected by a cable that runs under the patient’s skin, down the back of the neck to a battery pack implanted in the patient’s chest. A constant low-level current stimulates the brain tissue, but is otherwise imperceptible to the patient.

The devices are the same as those already being used successfully as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, severe depression, and even chronic pain; all that varies is the exact segment of the brain where implantation occurs. In Parkinson’s, for instance, the subthalamic nucleus is stimulated. Depression targets a small area of the cingulate cortex.

“This gives us new insight into which brain structures are involved in memory”, says Professor Lozano.
More news of Lozano’s research is expected to be announced later today to Canadian media.

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Subprime losses look MUCH bigger

Posted in Business, Daily life at 2:17 pm by LeisureGuy

If they are going to try to make up the losses by raising credit card rates, they’re going to have to start charging loan-shark rates. Take a look:

Senior global policymakers have raised projections for the size of subprime-related credit losses in a move that implies financial institutions will have to increase write-offs.

Speaking after the meeting of Group of Seven finance leaders, Peer Steinbrück, German finance minister, said the G7 now feared that write-offs of losses on securities linked to US subprime mortgages could reach $400bn.

This is sharply higher than the $120bn credit losses that Wall Street banks and other institutions have revealed in recent weeks – and also far bigger than the US Federal Reserve’s estimates for subprime losses last year of $100bn-$150bn.

But G7 finance ministers admitted that it remained unclear where much of this subprime pain would eventually emerge, not least because the path of the credit crunch was still uncertain. Mr Steinbrück and other ministers appealed to financial institutions to provide “prompt and full disclosure’’ of losses, to restore confidence.

“The next 10 days to two weeks will be crucial because we are going to have the first audited accounts [from financial institutions] since the crisis started,” added Mario Draghi, governor of the Bank of Italy and chair of the Financial Stability Forum, a committee of international supervisors and central bankers.

History of psychological torture at the CIA

Posted in Government tagged torture at 2:06 pm by LeisureGuy

“Psychological torture” is, I believe, torture that leaves no physical traces. Here’s the post:

Advances in the History of Psychology has alerted me to a gripping video lecture on the development of CIA psychological torture techniques from the Cold War to War on Terror.

It was an invited lecture at the University of California by historian Prof Alfred McCoy who has long specialised in the history of the US secret services.

He argues that the results of CIA research into psychological torture can be clearly seen in both the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo bay and images of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

By contrast when I looked at those photos, I did not see snapshots of simple brutality or a breakdown in military discipline. For example, that most iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi with fake electrical wires hanging from his extended arms shows not the sadism of a few ‘creeps’, but instead, the two key trademarks of the CIA’s psychological torture: the hood was for sensory disorientation and the arms extended for self-inflicted pain.

McCoy discusses how these techniques were researched and developed by some of the most distinguished cognitive scientists of the time and were reflected in now uncovered CIA documents, including the 1961 ‘Manipulation of Human Behavior’ research summary, the 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, and the 1983 ‘Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual‘.

He notes that these techniques have been developed and legitimised by a legal framework that was deliberately designed not to outlaw existing techniques, despite the fact there is no strong basis for their effectiveness and evidence suggests that psychological torture has a similar long-term impact to physical torture.

Interestingly, he suggests that Guantanamo is both being used as a centre for gathering intelligence, as well as a sort of ‘lab’ for testing and developing new methods.

McCoy is the author of the recent book ‘A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror’ on which this talk is based, in which he also argues that the work on Donald Hebb and Stanley Milgram were partly funded by the CIA to help understand how to break through people’s psychological defences.

The lecture has a long introduction by one of the University’s dignitaries, so you can skip to 11:30 when it really starts in earnest.

Advances in the History of psychology has also been keeping track of recent discussion about the book and recent findings about the role of the CIA in funding American psychology research in the 50s and 60s.

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Interesting thoughts about museums…

Posted in Business, Daily life, Government tagged museums at 10:37 am by LeisureGuy

Michael O’Hare on museums:

Managers know that organizations are liable to mismanage capital both ways; sometimes we undercapitalize workers because it seems more expensive than it really is to give them what they need to do their work (proper classrooms in schools and universities are a common example here), and sometimes we ignore capital goods being wasted by disuse.

In the second category, spectacularly, are most of the works of art in top-rank and even middle-level museums. Museums that show a tiny fraction of their collections (5% is common) have the rest in storage unseen and unused until… until when? In practice, until the time that a curator might write an article. Eli Broad has given the Los Angeles County Museum of Art a hatful of money to build a new building that will have his name, but has had second thoughts about a tacit promise to give his collection of 2000 works to the museum.

“We don’t want it to end up in storage, in either our basement or somebody else’s basement,” Mr. Broad said. “So I, as the collector, am saying, ‘If you’re not willing to commit to show it, why don’t we just make it available to you when you want it, as opposed to giving it to you, and then our being unhappy that it’s only up 10 percent or 20 percent of the time or not being shown at all?’”

Bravo, Mr. Broad. Now lets start doing some hard thinking about the real binding constraint on what museums should be about, namely (as my Arts and Cultural Policy students usually come to see it) “More better engagement by more people with art”. Candidates include

1. exhibition space in museums generally and in any particular city
2. works of art owned by any particular museum
3. museum admission pricing
4. interpretive and educational complements to art engagement, at the museum, in schools, and from parents
5. social conventions and expectations of art engagement
6. private ownership of original works
7. works of art displayed in museums
8. audience available time
9. audience hands-on experience as amateur artists

As Mr. Broad astutely notes, “having more stuff in the basement” (the difference between #2 and #7) never appears in this list, because it has nothing to do with the objective as stated. I point out the obvious, that “more better engagement etc.” is not precisely the same as “more status and peer reputation for museum professional staff”. These subtle, delicate, hairsbreadth distinctions are a specialty of policy academics, preen preen; of course we are happy to share, and pleased when the likes of Mr. Broad notice them on his own.

And Mark Kleiman adds:

[O'Hare] omits my personal candidate: museum opening hours. If a supermarket can figure out how to stay open 24/7, why can’t museums at least be open until midnight three nights a weekend?

Again, Mike’s analysis is right: if museums were held accountable, internally or externally, for earning a decent return (in the form of quality-adjusted viewer-hours) on their billions of dollars’ worth of invested capital (in the form of works of art), it would be obvious that they can’t afford to be closed for such a large proportion of prime viewing hours. Current hours are convenient mostly for ladies who lunch: a worthy audience, no doubt, but not the only audience.

When the phrase “museum date” re-enters the language, we’ll know museum managers are starting to think like marketers rather than custodians.

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A new policy toward Cuba struggling to emerge?

Posted in Democrats, Election, GOP at 10:17 am by LeisureGuy

Our policy toward Cuba has been a total failure, yet we cling to it. But things may be a-changing:

The talk of South Florida is the possible changing of the guard in three congressional districts.

For the first time in 20 years, long-time Republican members of Congress from greater Miami (Districts 18, 21 and 25) face strong challenges from Democratic candidates.

The three incumbents, all of Cuban descent, have strong ties to the area’s older conservative Cuban community and actively support its hard-line approach toward Cuba. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, in office since 1989 and 1993 respectively, have easily fended off earlier Democratic contenders. Diaz-Balart’s brother, Mario, was elected in 2002.

But this time around, their challengers are also well known in local political circles.

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Habeas case goes to US Supreme Court

Posted in Bush Administration, GOP, Government at 10:13 am by LeisureGuy

This is important—and astonishing, even given the Bush Administration’s previous record of disregard of the law:

This week, the solicitor general will file an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court on a little-watched case from Guantánamo. But this case demands attention because it presents in stark relief the two key questions of the government’s extraterritorial detentions: Has the government been lying when it claims to have detained a hard core of Al Qaeda and the Taliban at Guantánamo? Can the government suborn the judiciary into covering this up?

Until now, all eyes have been on a case called Boumedienne v. Bush, argued before the Supreme Court on Dec. 5, 2007. In Boumedienne, the court heard the Guantánamo detainees’ challenge to recent legislation that stripped them of the historical right of habeas corpus—which allows them to challenge their detention in federal court.

Despite the fanfare, a majority of justices have already signaled that the “Great Writ”—as habeas is known—does, in fact, extend to Guantánamo. The real question is: what happens next?

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More on the credit card rate hikes

Posted in Business, Congress, Daily life at 8:58 am by LeisureGuy

Banks are paying lower interest rates with the Fed rate cuts, but they are charging more interest on credit cards. Reason: because banks lost money (through stupidity and greed) via the subprime lending, they still want to make the profit history look good, and one way to do that is to raise credit card rates. (Stupidity and greed still going strong, it seems.) Now Congress is starting to pay attention:

The Federal Reserve’s dramatic rate cuts were expected to make it cheaper for consumers to use credit cards. But credit card interest rates remain high and in many cases have even climbed.

Bruised by a rise in foreclosures, banks have been reluctant to lower rates for cardholders who have missed payments or had their credit scores slip, analysts and industry watchdogs said. Yet even some cardholders who pay on time have not benefited from the Federal Reserve’s recent actions, as banks raise rates and fees to make up for losses in their mortgage departments, analysts said.

“Not everyone is going to get a rate decrease,” said Edmund Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a Washington-based consumer advocacy organization. “People presume that because the Fed lowers rates, the banks will.”

The increases have perplexed customers such as Richard Davis, an insurance agent who lives in Fairfax County who said the annual percentage rate on his Chase Business Visa card went from 8 percent to 24 percent in December, three months after the Fed’s first rate cut. “That just floored me,” he said.

Card companies say they are exercising their right to protect themselves from risky borrowers and market conditions. But their actions have attracted the attention of Congress, which is considering several bills that would crack down on lending practices.

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Science and the candidates

Posted in Election, Science at 8:49 am by LeisureGuy

Hope they show up:

The organizers of a proposed science and technology debate among the presidential candidates have set a date, April 18, and place, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. This would be four days before the Pennsylvania primary.

The group, ScienceDebate2008.com, has sent invitations to each of the remaining candidates.

Now the big question is whether their handlers will allow them to engage the thorniest scientific issues — like the dribble of money that the United States has invested in energy research through Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses; fetal rights and embryonic stem cell research; the need to add a cost to burning fossil fuels; reconciling science with belief in an all-powerful deity; the theory of evolution, which so many Americans (read voters) reject; etc.

Is there a big enough constituency passionate about science and related issues for campaign strategists to justify having candidates spend an hour or two on such prickly issues?

The latest polling from the Pew Research Center on public concern (the lack of it, actually) about climate change doesn’t suggest a groundswell. I’d like to think the candidates and their advisers will consent, but my guess is they’ll offer surrogates (although I’ll happily be proved wrong).

John Tierney, over at TierneyLab, asked readers back in December to suggest questions. I posted on the debate prospect when David Goldston, who spent 20 years in the science-policy tussle on Capitol Hill, said it could backfire.

The organizers of the debate have been accumulating thousands of endorsements — including those of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science — and hundreds of possible questions, as well, which can be explored on their Web site.

The site contains reams of useful background provided by the organizers, who include two screenwriters, one of whom is a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin (whose 199th birthday happens to be Tuesday), and the science blogger and author Chris Mooney.

If you were an adviser to one of the front-tier candidates, what would you suggest?

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Great start to a new week

Posted in Shaving at 7:54 am by LeisureGuy

The Monday shave is always a pleasure: a two-day stubble, and thus a shaving stick. I used the Boots shave stick this morning, an ideal shave stick for travel with its nifty plastic case. Boots shave soap and stick were formerly unavailable in the US—and Boots wouldn’t ship to the US—but now Razor and Brush carries them (scroll way down): the soap in a tub, the shave stick, and the shave stick refill.

The Edwin Jagger medium silvertip got a fine lather, and I took my time lathering because I was enjoying it.

A new Polsilver Stainless blade in the Edwin Jagger Lined Chatsworth, and three smooth passes to what would once have been an exceptionally nice shave—but now, the Oil Pass perfects it. I used the new formulation of my own mix (see details at the link), and I used just one drop. Wonderful! Removing the Jojoba Oil and doubling the Olive Oil improved the mix quite well, and I do like the Majmua fragrance.

The oil pass polished away all traces of roughness remaining, and the Paul Sebastian aftershave was a good finish.

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02.11.08

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