Later On

Pam Belluck in the NY Times:

Smoking bans in places like restaurants, offices and public buildings reduce cases of heart attacks and heart disease, according to a report released Thursday by a federally commissioned panel of scientists.

The report, issued by the Institute of Medicine, concluded that exposure to secondhand smoke significantly increased the risk of having a heart attack among both smokers and nonsmokers. The panel also said it found that a reduction in heart problems began to take effect fairly quickly after a smoking ban was instituted and that exposure to low or fleeting levels of secondhand smoke could cause cardiovascular problems.

“Even a small amount of exposure to secondhand smoke can increase in blood clotting, constrict blood vessels and can cause a heart attack,” said Dr. Neal L. Benowitz, a professor of medicine, psychiatry, and biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the panel. “Short-term exposure can make a big difference.”

“For places in the country that don’t have smoking bans,” Dr. Benowitz added, “smoking bans need to be put in place as quickly as possible. The longer we wait, the more disease we are accepting.”

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Michelle Conlin in Business Week:

As the Great Recession continues to devour jobs at an alarming rate, tales are legion about the millions of unemployed struggling to right their lives and recover their self-esteem. But what happens to those left behind?

Would it surprise you to learn that survivors can suffer just as much, if not more, than colleagues who get laid off? It certainly surprised a team of academic researchers who embedded themselves at Boeing (BA) from 1996 to 2006, a tumultuous decade during which the company laid off tens of thousands. The results of the study will appear next year in a Yale University Press book called Turbulence: Boeing and the State of American Workers and Managers. "How much better off the laid-off were was stunning and shocking to us," says Sarah Moore, a University of Puget Sound industrial psychology professor who is one of the book’s four authors. "So much of the literature talks about how dreadful unemployment is."

By early 1996 the researchers were busy interviewing and testing 3,500 Boeing employees—from line workers to senior executives. The timing was propitious. Struggling to adapt to new technology and competition from Europe’s Airbus, Boeing in 1997 merged with McDonnell Douglas. Over the next six years, Boeing’s workforce of 234,850 shrunk 33%, to 157,441.

With each round of layoffs, the survivors hustled to reinvent themselves. They re-proved, re-auditioned, and repositioned, only to watch yet another new manager—pushing the fad du jour—parade through the door. Employees who had once seen themselves in every plane that flew overhead were now trading in gallows humor. As in, "Dead worker walking."  …

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Very interesting article by Nathanial Gronewold in Scientific American:

The financial crisis and subsequent global recession have led to much soul-searching among economists, the vast majority of whom never saw it coming. But were their assumptions and models wrong only because of minor errors or because today’s dominant economic thinking violates the laws of physics?

A small but growing group of academics believe the latter is true, and they are out to prove it. These thinkers say that the neoclassical mantra of constant economic growth is ignoring the world’s diminishing supply of energy at humanity’s peril, failing to take account of the principle of net energy return on investment. They hope that a set of theories they call "biophysical economics" will improve upon neoclassical theory, or even replace it altogether.

But even this nascent field finds itself divided, as evidenced by the vigorous and candid back-and-forth debate last week over where to go next. One camp says its models prove the world is headed toward a dramatic economic collapse as energy scarcity takes hold, while another camp believes there is still time to turn the ship around. Still, all biophysical economists see only very bleak prospects for the future of modern civilization, putting a whole new spin on the phrase "the dismal science."

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Excellent post, which also contains the text of Obama’s speech on global warming.

Interesting:

More than half the people who take antidepressants for depression never get relief. Why? Because the cause of depression has been oversimplified and drugs designed to treat it aim at the wrong target, according to new research from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. The medications are like arrows shot at the outer rings of a bull’s eye instead of the center.

A study from the laboratory of long-time depression researcher Eva Redei, presented at the Neuroscience 2009 conference in Chicago this week, appears to topple two strongly held beliefs about depression. One is that stressful life events are a major cause of depression. The other is that an imbalance in neurotransmitters in the brain triggers depressive symptoms.

Both findings are significant because these beliefs were the basis for developing drugs currently used to treat depression.

Redei, the David Lawrence Stein Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern’s Feinberg School, found powerful molecular evidence that quashes the long-held dogma that stress is generally a major cause of depression. Her new research reveals that there is almost no overlap between stress-related genes and depression-related genes.

"This is a huge study and statistically powerful," Redei said. "This research opens up new routes to develop new antidepressants that may be more effective. There hasn’t been an antidepressant based on a novel concept in 20 years."

Her findings are based on extensive studies with a model of severely depressed rats that mirror many behavioral and physiological abnormalities found in patients with major depression. The rats, after decades of development, are believed to be the most depressed in the world.

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Interesting:

Low alcohol consumption is bad for your health in general. Researchers writing in BioMed Central’s open access journal Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation studied the relationship between alcohol consumption and health to test the current theory which suggests improved health is responsible for the link found between low alcohol consumption and increased wages. Johan Jarl, from Lund University, Sweden, worked with a team of researchers to determine the effect of low alcohol consumption on health by measuring alcohol-related medical care costs and episodes collected during the Swedish Cost of Alcohol Project in 2002. They found that, with the exception of people more than 80 years old, men who consumed up to five units a day and women who consumed up to 2.5 units a day cost the health service more than those who do not drink. Their finding calls into question the previous assumption that low alcohol consumption is good for your health.

Several studies show that people with low alcohol intake are more highly paid. One common, but untested, explanation for this link is that low consumers spend more time at work and therefore gets better pay due to the protective effect of alcohol on some diseases. According to Jarl, "In this study, however, we found that, when including also those diseases where low consumption increases the risk of morbidity and mortality, low-to-moderate alcohol intake actually has a net negative health impact", adding, "It is therefore doubtful if the common explanation of health as the link between alcohol consumption and increased wages is valid in its existing form."

Speaking about other factors that, in the light of these findings, could account for the alcohol-wage link, Jarl said, "Family background, social networking and subjective health benefits may be responsible. It is not unlikely that the link is actually compiled of several different factors that together give a significant effect of low alcohol consumption on wage. It should come as no surprise that the nature of links such as this is normally complex and care should be taken not to oversimplify".

Source: BioMed Central

Interesting book review by Carl Bogus (unfortunate name) in The American Prospect:

The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 123 pages, $17.00

Four days after Barack Obama’s decisive victory in November 2008, I attended a conference at Yale University titled "The Next American Conservatism?" The conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute organized the conference in advance of the election — in the face of oncoming doom, as it were — to try to figure out what sort of conservatism might rise from the ashes. But although the intellectuals on the program seemed to take for granted that conservatism as we know it is dead, none of them ventured an opinion as to why it died, whether it deserved to die, or what was, or should be, next.

Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review as well as the author of an acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, offers his postmortem in an elegant little volume. Tanenhaus would not have been surprised that the participants at Yale did not even attempt meaningful speculation. "Today’s conservatives," he writes, "resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology." When a volcano erupts in your face, it is difficult to be reflective.

Tanenhaus’ book is an account of the life of modern conservatism — its birth, youth, adulthood, and senescence. He is a fine writer who recounts the tale knowledgeably and well. The story opens in the 1930s, when conservatives were trying to find an answer to the New Deal. According to Tanenhaus, the Old Right had no answer to give: Not only did it lack policy alternatives; it could not explain "why and how the world had changed." The Old Right had come out of "a pastoral land of rural communities and small towns," and it was bewildered by "an urbanized industrial nation with ever-more-complex constituencies — the teeming ethnic populations in northern cities, the increasingly organized and disciplined labor unions."

Thus a New Right emerged…

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Check out these sites.

Oddly enough, I frequently read that DDT is good and that banning it is a terrible idea, regardless of the damage to the environment and living creatures. Maybe this report will change some minds:

Women who lived in villages sprayed with DDT to reduce malaria gave birth to 33 per cent more baby boys with urogenital birth defects (UGBD) between 2004 and 2006 than women in unsprayed villages, according to research published online by the UK-based urology journal BJUI. And women who stayed at home in sprayed villages, rather than being a student or working, had 41 per cent more baby boys with UGBDs, such as missing testicles or problems with their urethra or penis.

The authors suggest that this is because they spent more time in homes where domestic DDT-based sprays are still commonly used to kill the mosquitos that cause malaria, even in areas where organised mass spraying no longer takes place.

Researchers led by the University of Pretoria in South Africa studied 3,310 boys born to women from the Limpopo Province, where DDT spraying was carried out in high-risk areas between 1995 and 2003 to control malaria. The study compared boys born to women in the 109 villages that were sprayed, with those born to women from the 97 villages that were not.

This showed that 357 of the boys included in the study – just under 11 per cent – had UGBDs. The incidence of UGBDs was significantly higher if the mother came from a sprayed village.

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From Mind Hacks:

We often think that pressure on young women to be thin is a modern phenomenon, but a fascinating letter to the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry published in 2000 noted that this is not a new development. The authors cite evidence from Ancient Rome showing a similar cultural pressures were widespread:

Garner et al. (1985) wrote about the present “unprecedented emphasis on thinness and dieting” which is one factor responsible for the increase in anorexic and bulimic disorders. It is generally believed that dieting in pursuit of a thinner shape and slimness as a standard for feminine beauty are modern attitudes. However, a clear account can be found in the ancient comedy Terence’s Eunuchus.

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Kevin Drum blogs:

Speaking of books, here’s a passage from Mark Kleiman’s When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment that I’ve been meaning to blog for a while:

Given the decrease in lead exposure among children since the 1980s and the estimated effects of lead on crime, reduced lead exposure could easily explain a very large proportion — certainly more than half — of the crime decrease of the 1994-2004 period.  A careful statistical study relating local changes in lead exposure to local crime rates estimates the fraction of the crime decline due to lead reduction as greater than 90%.

Mark’s book is focused on a particular strategy for reducing crime, so this topic gets only a couple of pages in a chapter on miscellaneous methods of crime control.  But surely it deserves more?¹  If it’s really true that lead reduction was responsible for most of the post-1990 decrease in crime, and if changing demographics played a role as well, doesn’t that mean that everything else probably had almost no effect at all?  Broken windows, open-air drug markets, three-strikes laws, CompStat, bulging prison populations, etc. etc. — all of them together couldn’t have had more than a minuscule impact if lead and demographics explain almost everything.

I don’t really have a lot to say about this, actually.  Mainly I just wanted to highlight this passage because it’s pretty interesting.  It seems a little discouraging, though, if it’s really true that all our best efforts to reduce crime over the past couple of decades have had a collective impact only barely different from zero.

On the other hand, it certainly means that federal spending to eliminate lead from houses ought to be a no-brainer.  It would cost about $30 billion, but as Mark says, it would probably save us at least $30 billion per year in reduced crime.  The fact that Congress didn’t allocate this money long ago makes you wonder if maybe the Capitol building could use a lead abatement program of its own.²

¹Of course it deserves more.  So here’s a bit more.

²The stimulus bill included $100 million for lead abatement, which is fine.  But considering just how effective lead reduction is on all sorts of policy levels, it’s sort of a crime that they couldn’t manage to dig up a little more than that out of an $800 billion total.

Chalmers Johnson was a Cold Warrior who worked with the CIA for years. He describes how his point of view changed—and why—in this fascinating movie (available to Watch Instantly). Highly recommended: it’s not an interview, it’s just him explaining what goes on, and he clearly knows what he’s talking about.

I can’t wait to start making Megs’s food. Take a look at this cool pictorial on making food for your cat(s).

Those that are low in iron. See this note.

From Climate Progress:

A recent poll by the National Wildlife Federation, which counts more than 420,000 members across 42 states, found that 66 percent of hunters and anglers surveyed believed that global warming was already occurring.

A Gallup poll in March 2009 found that only 53 percent of the general population shared the same view.

People who spend a lot of their time outdoors are more likely to see the obvious — the climate is changing and invasive species like the bark beetle are ravaging the West.  That’s a key point of this piece in the NYT blog, Green Inc:

More than 13,000 hunters and anglers from across the country joined a “virtual town hall” teleconference on Tuesday to hear a discussion of the impact of climate change on fish and wildlife populations, and to voice their support for federal action to limit carbon emissions.

The call was hosted by the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund, American Hunters and Shooters, and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

“It’s very important in my opinion that we do pass the climate change bill,” said Ted Roosevelt IV, a prominent conservationist and the great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, during the phone call.

The virtual meeting is part of a recent wave of climate activism by national hunting and fishing groups, whose conservative-leaning membership has expressed growing concern with the impacts of climate change on wildlife.

It’s great to see a broader group of the population starting to engage in what will be the central issue of our time.  But then, for outdoorsmen and -women, the changes driven by human emissions are all-but-impossible to miss: …

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Some Republican politicians embrace government healthcare—but only for themselves. From an email from the Center for American Progress:

Yesterday, the office of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) released an internal study showing that 151 members of Congress "currently receive government-funded; government-administered single-payer health care — Medicare." Of those 151 members, 55 are Republicans who also happen to be "steadfastly opposed [to] other Americans getting the public option, like the one they have chosen."

Included on Weiner’s list are anti-public option crusaders Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), and Rep. Peter King (R-NY).

Weiner explained that the purpose of this study is to "point out some of the hypocrisy of this debate." "Even in a town known for hypocrisy," Weiner said in a statement yesterday, "this list of 55 Members of Congress deserve some sort of prize. They apparently think the public option is ok for them, but not anyone else."

Back in July, Weiner, an outspoken proponent of single-payer health care reform, offered an amendment that would have given these 55 people a chance to end their own public option by eliminating Medicare once and for all. According to Weiner, it was "put-up or shut-up time for the phonies who deride the so-called ‘public option.’" Of course, no one voted for the measure. Yet now "you have members of Congress thumping their chest how they’re against government health care," Weiner noted, adding, "and yet when it’s time for them to accept Medicare, they’re like, ‘Sign me up!’"

Interesting column by David Sirota:

For better or worse, our American Idiocracy has come to rely on athletes as national pedagogues. Michael Jordan educated the country about commitment and just doing it. A.C. Green lectured us about sexual caution. Serena Williams and John McEnroe taught us what sportsmanship is — and is not. And Charles Barkley outlined how society should define role models.

So when a single week like this one sees both the Justice Department back states’ medical marijuana laws, and a Gallup poll show record-level support for pot legalization, we can look to two superjocks — Lance Armstrong and Michael Phelps — for the key lesson about our absurd drug policy.

This Tale of Two Supermen began in February when Phelps, the gold-medal swimmer, was plastered all over national newspapers in a photo that showed him hitting a marijuana bong. Though he was smoking in private, the image ignited a public firestorm. USA Swimming suspended Phelps, Kellogg pulled its endorsement deal and the Associated Press sensationalized the incident as a national decision about whether heroes should "be perfect or flawed."

The alleged imperfection was Phelps’ decision to quietly consume a substance that "poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol," as a redacted World Health Organization report admits. That’s a finding confirmed by almost every objective science-based analysis, including a landmark University of California study in 2006 showing "no association at all" between marijuana use and cancer.

Alcohol, by contrast, causes roughly 1 in 30 of the world’s cancer cases, according to the International Journal of Cancer. And a new report by Cancer Epidemiology journal shows that even beer, seemingly the least potent drink, may increase the odds of developing tumors.

Which brings us to Armstrong. This month, the Tour de France champion who beat cancer inked a contract to hawk Anheuser-Busch’s alcohol.

That’s right, less than a year after Phelps was crucified for merely smoking weed in private, few noticed or protested the planet’s most famous cancer survivor becoming the public face of a possible carcinogen…

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Hint: it’s a photo made through a microscope.

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