They are treating mental illness with nicotine, not cigarettes

Treating mental illness with cigarettes
[Via Boing Boing]

While nationally, only about 20% of Americans smoke, 80% of schizophrenic Americans smoke. That’s interesting, but it’s not the most interesting part. Apparently, there’s some evidence that those people with schizophrenia are using tobacco as a form of self medication.

At the Risk Science Blog, Mark Stewart looks at the weird dilemma people with schizophrenia are faced with when it comes to smoking:

Schizophrenics often have auditory hallucinations, paranoia, delusions, and disorganized thinking. These symptoms are predominantly caused by the inability of the brains of schizophrenics to differentiate, sort, and focus on the multitude of stimuli that go on around us. Think of being in a busy restaurant. Imagine that instead of being able to block out all the noises, conversations, and movements around you, every single piece of sensory information is as important as the interesting things said by the attractive person sitting across from you. The effects of cigarette smoking and nicotine help schizophrenics through increased selective attention.

“They should use other forms of medication,” I hear you say. Great idea, except for the fact that anti-psychotic drugs are very expensive, do not work very well for most people, and have extreme side effects. Tardive dyskinesia is the most common side effect. This makes it very hard for the body to move in normal ways at normal speeds. Also, there are common metabolic side effects that are quite similar to an individual having diabetes. (Just what someone with a severe mental illness needs!) Thus, the cheapness, effectiveness, and availability of cigarettes offer most schizophrenics some succor. Smoking leads to schizophrenics having a 30-60% increased risk of respiratory disorders and heart disease, but is this a risk that is worth taking?

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Nicotine is actually a pretty wonderful drug, making one more capable at any tasks. So I am not surprised that it is being used to self-medicate for a variety of mental illnesses.

But cigarettes are not the treatment.

It is the delivery system than causes the problem. So, does putting someone on nicotine patches reduce their mental illnesses? If so, then they should all be prescribed nicotine as a first treatment.

Of course,nicotine is one of the most addictive chemicals around but for a very good reason. It appears to help neural function. I am not sure if there are any proven long term problems with properly dosed nicotine, at least not compared with schizophrenia.

Giving away the ending actually makes people like it better

NCBI ROFL: Spoiler alert! Spoilers actually increase enjoyment of stories.
[Via Discoblog]

Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories.

“The enjoyment of fiction through books, television, and movies may depend, in part, on the psychological experience of suspense. Spoilers give away endings before stories begin, and may thereby diminish suspense and impair enjoyment; indeed, as the term suggests, readers go to considerable lengths to avoid prematurely discovering endings … However, people’s ability to reread stories with undiminished pleasure, and to read stories in which the genre strongly implies the ending, suggests that suspense regarding the outcome may not be critical to enjoyment and may even impair pleasure by distracting attention from a story’s relevant details and aesthetic qualities … We conducted three experiments, each with stories from a different, distinct genre, to test the effects of spoilers on enjoyment.

…Writers use their artistry to make stories interesting, to engage readers, and to surprise them, but we found that giving away these surprises makes readers like stories better. This was true whether the spoiler revealed a twist at the end (e.g., that the condemned man’s daring escape is just a fantasy as the rope snaps taut around his neck) or solved the crime (e.g., Poirot discovers that …

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This is certainly non-intuituve. And I would imagine that many writers would hate the fact that their carefully crafted twists were better received if people knew about them before hand.

I’m glad NCBI ROFL read this for me. They wanted $35 for me to rad it myself. see, here is a case where spoilers were not only satisfying but also saved me money.

This may be Jobs’ greatest legacy

How Steve Jobs got the Internet to pay for content
[Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

Just about every Internet and print news outlet has paid tribute to Steve Jobs over the past few days, but PaidContent.org — a website dedicated to discussion of the sale of digital content — had one of the more interesting plaudits. In a post by Media Guardian’s Charles Arthur, Jobs was rightly given his place in history as the “man who got the Internet to pay for content.”

Arthur reflected on the sad state of affairs in the media biz just ten years ago. He notes that “if you wanted to download some music, your best bet was Napster or one of the filesharing systems such as LimeWire or KaZaA.” For the services that were actually considered legal, there were services like PressPlay and MusicNet requiring US$15 monthly subscriptions for low-quality streams that couldn’t be burned to CD.

Jobs came along with the iPod, and then followed up with the iTunes Music Store. If it hadn’t been for Jobs persuading the music companies in 2003 to license their songs to Apple, the store wouldn’t have happened. As Arthur notes, the music companies figured that Apple was just a tiny company with a minimal market share in the computer business, so they went along for the ride.

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Probably the single greatest thing Microsoft did was actually convince people to pay lots of money to own software. Before it was free or only leased.

Apple did the same thing – convincing people that paying for music was the right thing to do. But even more difficult, he had to convince the music companies to allow it.

Without the Reality Distortion Field, he may not have been able to accomplish even that.

That may be one reason why the lost of the Jobsian RDF will hurt Apple. But I would be willing to bet that either Cook has something just as useful – he has negotiated some incredible contracts for Apple –  or that someone with a similar trait arises at Apple.

The first and fourth amendments still hold force in the US

Appeals Court: Arresting Guy For Filming Cops Was A Clear Violation Of Both 1st & 4th Amendments
[Via Techdirt]

We’ve had a lot of stories this year about police arresting people for filming them. It’s become quite a trend. Even worse, a couple weeks ago, we wrote about a police officer in Massachusetts, Michael Sedergren, who is trying to get criminal wiretapping charges brought against a woman who filmed some police officers beating a guy. This officer claims that the woman violated Massachusetts anti-wiretapping law, a common claim from police in such situations.

Segederin may have been better off if he’d waited a couple weeks for an appeals court ruling that came out Friday, because that ruling found that arresting someone for filming the police is a clear violation of both the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. How the case got to this point is a bit complex, but basically, a guy named Simon Glik saw some police arresting someone in Boston, and thought they were using excessive force. He took out his camera phone and began recording. The police saw that and told him to stop taking pictures. He told them he was recording them, and that he’d seen them punch the guy they were arresting. One officer asked him if the phone recorded audio as well and Glik told him it did. At that point, they arrested him, saying that recording audio was a violation of Massachusetts wiretap laws.

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Very nice. And, as often is seen with court rulings that are right, the decision is pretty easy to read.

Things like:

Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting “the free discussion of governmental affairs.”

[snip]

Indeed, “[t]he freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.”

A very good decision.

The next tech leader will also have to have a Reality Distortion Field

by Bert Kaufmann

Steve Jobs And The Next Generation Of Silicon Valley Leaders
[Via Xeni @ Blogging.la]

Chris O’Brien, a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News asked: Who will be Silicon Valley’s next Steve Jobs?

He picked out five possible contenders and rejected a sixth.

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None of these guys will come close to filling Jobs’ shoes because of the Reality Distortion Field. In all the discussion about Jobs, little has been made of his RDF.

It is called charisma in other places but Jobs had the ability to not only hold your attention but also to make you BELIEVE – in whatever he happened to be talking about.

I mean, he made Ping sound like the most exciting thing ever. Or MobileMe.

The RDF was first named by Bud Tribble in 1981, when Apple was just a few years old. It is not just about hype.  Here is how Tribble described it:

In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.

He could make people believe they could actually accomplish things they ‘knew’ were not doable. Sure most of the time they were right but every so often, Jobs’ RDF actually got them to produce the impossible.

And it seems that a lot of people wanted to be part of the attempt to do the impossible.

Like the White Queen from Through the looking Glass, Jobs believes in as many as 6 impossible things before breakfast. And he can get others to believe them also.

No one has shown the ability to do that yet. It is the thing I’m going to miss the most. Even watching a keynote online did not completely diminish the RDF.