California's Penal system

The LA Times today.

No easy fix for the jail system
Jim Newton
Times Staff Writer

December 30, 2006 - Excerpts:

Charged with administering a jail system that shuffles repeat offenders through custody, fails to supply adequate medical care to many inmates and imposes burdens on courts and taxpayers, Los Angeles County leaders this week reverted to the strategies that have gotten them this far:

In the end, said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, the big fix for the county's jail woes may be in replacing Men's Central Jail, the antiquated and overflowing facility at the center of the system. But cost estimates top $1 billion, and the county does not have that money to spend, he said.

Sheriff Lee Baca disagrees. The disrepair in the county's jails, he said, is symptomatic of a larger, statewide retreat from leadership in public safety.

Those comments, along with others from top county officials, reflect the degree of helplessness that many in power feel with regard to local jails, whose troubling problems were illustrated by a series of stories published this month in The Times.

Meanwhile, conservatives fault civil libertarians and illegal immigrants; liberals bemoan a system that denies basic services, such as medical care, to inmates — many of them not even convicted of crimes.
   
"This is a concentrated form of what's in the community," he said of the county's inmate population. "We're the end result of a violent society."

Inmates in jails and prisons in the USA are the only population guaranteed health care as a constitutional right, but the problems of care delivery in outside hospitals, such as simply keeping decent records, are ten times worse in the inmate population - and less well funded. The effects fall heavily on the poor.

The LA Times had a previous article "Health Care Suffers at L.A. Jails."  The Washington post did a piece on the problems of California on June 11, 2006:  California's Crisis in Prison Systems a Threat to Public

"When it comes to prison systems, California is the 800-pound gorilla," said Alexander Busansky, a former prosecutor who is executive director of the U.S. Commission on Safety and Abuse, a think tank that works to improve prison conditions. "The problem in California is that hope is lost."

As the prison population grew and rehabilitation stopped, the Department of Corrections turned into an organization with "no other pretensions but human warehousing," said Franklin Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley.

Also in April, U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson in San Francisco took over the prisons' medical system, declaring that inmates were receiving inadequate care. Now, the judge is believed to be so exasperated with the slow pace of rehabilitation and with prison overcrowding that he is considering putting the entire system under federal control, said several sources familiar with the judge's plans.

A map of the overcrowding is here.

The problem is not just one of California, but nationwide.

According to a study published in the Baltimore Sun on June 1, 2003, and quoted here, 

Locked up in the Land of The Free

With a record-setting 2 million people locked up in American jails and prisons, the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country.

Overseas, U.S. imprisonment policy is widely seen as a blot on a society that prides itself on valuing liberty and just went to war to overturn Saddam Hussein's despotic rule in Iraq.

The latest statistics support that view. The new high of 2,019,234, announced by the Justice Department in April, underscores the extraordinary scale of imprisonment in the United States compared with that in most of the world.

Today the United States imprisons at a far greater rate not only than other developed Western nations do, but also than impoverished and authoritarian countries do.

On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran... Maryland has more citizens in prison and jail (an estimated 35,200) than all of Canada (31,600), though Canada's population is six times greater.

"This is a pretty serious experiment we've been engaged in," says Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that supports alternatives to prison. "I don't think history will judge us kindly."

Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton University, says sentencing policies have had a glaringly disproportionate impact on black men. The Justice Department reports that one in eight black men in their 20s and early 30s were behind bars last year, compared with one in 63 white men. A black man has a one-in-three chance of going to prison, the department says.

For black male high school dropouts, Western says, the numbers are higher: 41 percent of black dropouts between ages 22 and 30 were locked up in 1999.

"I think this is one of the most important developments in race relations in the last 30 years," he says.

For some, however, this captive population is a cheap workforce.  Eric Schlosser, in The Atlantic Monthly, in December, 1998 published an article on the "Prison-Industrial Complex".

Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars—the majority of them nonviolent offenders—mean jobs for depressed regions and windfalls for profiteers  

The bullet point data from that article, and various background statistics, are reported here.

United States has approximately ... the combined populations of Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, and Miami behind bars - it is more more people than any other country in the world -- perhaps half a million more than Communist China.

70% of the prison inmates in the United States are illiterate

200,000 inmates suffer from a serious mental illness

60% to 80% has a history of substance abuse

80% of prisoners in California are African-Americans

technorati tags:prison, jail, racism, poverty, mentalillness, drugabuse, corrections, healthcare, inmates, statistics, socialjustice, disparities, policy

Social networking, pornography, or mental illness?

Here's an archived post on Many2Many a group weblog on social software, from November 11, 2005:

I’ve been thinking a lot about how anti-MySpace propaganda has been rooted in the culture of fear. Given that youth play a critical, but different, role in social software, i suspect that folks might be interested in how MySpace is getting perceived as a scary, scary place.

Growing up in a culture of fear: from Columbine to banning of MySpacelooks at how mainstream media is inciting moral panic around youthparticipation in public spaces. The article is framed around the ban ofMySpace in certain schools. MySpace blamed for alienated youth’s threatsfollows up on this, looking specifically at how Columbine-esquesituations are still not being addressed for their core problem: youthalienation. Instead, we’re still blaming the technology.

Anyway, fear of pornography and sexual predators on the web continues to lead to efforts,aguably overkill, to shut down interactive portions of social networking sites.

A politically left view of John McCain's recent bill presents just a concern.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, December 15, 2006

Republican Senator John McCain has introduced legislation that would fine blogs up to $300,000 for offensive statements, photos and videos posted by visitors on comment boards, effectively nixing the open exchange of ideas on the Internet, providing a lethal injection for unrestrained opinion, and acting as the latest attack tool to chill freedom of speech on the world wide web.

McCain's proposal, called the "Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act," encourages informants to shop website owners to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who then pass the information on to the relevant police authorities.

Comment boards for specific articles are extremely popular and also notoriously hard to moderate. Popular articles often receive comments that run into the thousands over the course of time. In many cases, individuals hostile to the writer's argument deliberately leave obscene comments and images simply to sully the reputation of the website owners. Therefore under the terms of this bill, right-wing extremists from a website like Free Republic could effectively terminate a liberal leaning website like Raw Story by the act of posting a single photograph of a naked child. This precedent could be the kiss of death for blogs as we know them and its reverberations would negatively impact the entire Internet.

Senator John McCain's web site presents a different view, excerpts below, emphasis added.

Inrecent years, technology has contributed to the greater distributionand availability, and, some believe, desire for child pornography. Isay child pornography, but that label does not describe accurately whatis at issue. As emphasized by a recent Department of Justice report,“child pornography” does not come close to describing these images,which are nothing short of recorded images of child sexual abuse. These images are, quite literally, digital evidence of violent sexualcrimes perpetrated against the most vulnerable among us.

The violence ofthe images continues to increase as well. Dr. Sharon Cooper, anationally recognized expert on this subject, stated before a SeptemberSenate Commerce Committee hearing that the images often depict“sadistic gross sexual assault and sodomy.”

To better defineand expand the types of online companies obligated to report childpornography, the legislation would require a broad range of onlineservice providers – including web hosting companies, domain nameregistrars, and social networking sites – to report child pornographyto NCMEC.

Thelegislation would help ensure greater compliance with the childpornography reporting requirements under Federal law by increasingthree-fold the penalties for knowing failure to report childpornography to NCMEC. It would also move the reporting requirementfrom title 42, which relates to the public’s health and welfare, totitle 18, our Federal criminal code. This is to underscore that abreach of the reporting obligations is a violation of criminal law. Inaddition, the Act would eliminate the legal liability of online service providers for actions taken to comply with the child pornography reporting requirements.

What is not obvious from this point-in-time snapshot of this one front is how far the line has moved in the last few decades of what constitutes material that is socially acceptable to the community at large, and, for that matter, what "local community" is used for setting standards of decency, depravity, or criminal behavior.

The New York Times had a letter to the editor this morning that stunned me. I guess it's been a long time since my children were in school, but it seems to confirm that the 24 hour a day bathing in lifestyles on television and in movies does change the definitions of a great deal of life. It's against those standards that people measure themselves, with significant impact on depression or suicide if they don't "fit in" or "match up" to, say Britney Spear's behavior.

Here's the start of that Letter from the Times.

Middle School Girls gone Wild
Dec 29, 2006

...The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto...The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, notfully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this.

I have to wonder, if 20 years of media assault has transformed Little House on the Prarie to the above scene in middle school regarding sex, what has the last decade of sadomasochistic and dark, psychotic violence in the media done to the internal working of our children and the new generation regarding what is the norm for interpersonal behavior and what we "expect" them to be like.

We have to ask, keeping Glasser's book Fear in mind, whether this concern is hyped up and everything is well with a few exceptions, or whether the social fabric is becoming completely unravelled. Is Long Island representative of what's going on in the rest of the US?

And, on a global scale, if this is the fact that te USA presents to the world and says "We want you to be more like us", I can understand why some cultures are not buying what we're selling.

We may have the paradoxical world in which Islamic culture views the entire USA the way John McCain views the web.

There is certainly a basis here for a motivation besides "envy" for parents rejecting the new American model of "A wonderful life". And, as with the auto industry, what we're selling as social norms may not be what the world prefers to buy.

And, judging from the rate of depression, violence, and suicide among youth today, this may not even be what the audience or "consumers" of this material really want to buy.

Blacks and Neighborhoods in America

"Bowling team members lament disintegration of community ties as their deepest-held beliefs fall out of vogue with some younger black men." Echoing Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, Lonnae O'Neal Parker assisted by Meg Smith add to the Washington Post's "Being a Black Man" series with today's article The Old Kinship.

Excerpts:

"When we were in the South, that's all we had was each other. We were still competing in school or athletics or whatever, being the best we could be, but we still had the community," Hodges said. And community held you up. Black people have lost that, the bowler said. "We're separate now. Now, we're fragile."

The retired ex-union guys have watched the rules change. In two generations, they've seen some of their deepest beliefs -- in work, family, respect and responsibility --fall out of vogue with some younger black men. And they've seen their vaunted brotherhood, an answer when the old Negro spiritual wondered how their souls got over, dissipate as black men maim and kill one another over the smallest slights. It's something they could not have imagined as young men, laboring to find their places....

Community was often a balm against internalizing racism, Jackson said,but it was also easier to spot racism "when there was a sign that said' whites only.' "In some ways, Thompson recognizes that younger men face tough challenges: fewer good jobs, poor schools. But he can't shake the belief that a black man should strive, and overcome anyway, the way he did....

And youth culture is violent and intolerant, the bowlers agreed. There is no room for a simple "I'm sorry" anymore..

"Sometimes I wish she would have had the opportunity to grow up like I did," Garrison said. No locks on the door. "The neighborhood was like another mama and daddy."

The neighborhood protected you...

"We was raised right," Mitchell said. "But it was our generation that lost the kids."

"If we could just get back the closeness," Hodges said.

It is a lamentation for a gathering of older men.

It seems to be a time for considering the role of neighborhoods in our lives. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a front page article How Much Does a Neighborhood Affect the Poor, as part of their series "Poverty: The New Search for Solutions"

Beginning in 1994, the federal government offered a lottery for housing vouchers to families in five major cities. Families were randomly assigned to different groups. One group received vouchers to be used specifically to subsidize rents in neighborhoods where poverty was low. About 860 families eventually moved.

Another group, of 1,440 families, wasn't offered vouchers and, initially at least, stayed in high-poverty neighborhoods. Researchers have since tracked and compared the fortunes of the two groups.

The program, called Moving to Opportunity, was administered by HUD.

Findings: Among them:boys whose families moved actually fared worse than boys who stayed in bad neighborhoods. Girls, however, fared significantly better. Adults felt better, physically and mentally, than those who stayed behind, but didn't do better financially.

Among nearly 800 teenage girls, 83% of those who relocated to low-poverty neighborhoods had either graduated from high school or were still in school five years after the move, compared with 71% in the control group. Alcohol use was lower. Arrest rates were lower. And mental-health measures improved. Away from the violence of the ghetto, girls seemed to flourish.

Teenage boys didn't. School participation deteriorated and property-crime rates, mental distress, and smoking all increased among those who moved with the vouchers, compared with teenage boys in families who didn't move.

"It seems like the boys were less able to make social connections to their new areas," says Jeffrey Kling...

A more recent review of social connectivity was published in the June 2006 issue of the American Sociological Review, itself rsummarized by Duke News and Communications.

Durham, N.C. -- Americans’ circle of confidants has shrunk dramatically in the past two decades and the number of people who say they have no one with whom to discuss important matters has more than doubled, according to a new study by sociologists at Duke University and the University of Arizona.

“The evidence shows that Americans have fewer confidants and those ties are also more family-based than they used to be,” said Lynn Smith-Lovin, Robert L. Wilson Professor of Sociology at Duke University and one of the authors of Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks Over Two Decades.

look at cultures wouldn't be complete without the related comparison between Detroit Michigan and the city just south across the river, Windsor Ontario. (yep,it's south.)

An interview with Barry Glassner on-line tells us that:

MICHAEL MOORE used Barry Glassner's book The Culture of Fear (2000) as research for the Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine. The film’s telling comparison of Windsor, Canada, and Detroit, two demographically similar and neighboring cities with dramatically different crime statistics, is based on Glassner’s research.

(photo credit: Kali Tal )

technorati tags:blacks, neighborhoods, socialcapital, psychosocial, multilevel, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, depression, crime, poverty, race, urban, connections, isolation, friends, friendship

Stopping alcohol can restore some cognitive function

Undoing alcohol's damage to the mind, by Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times, Dec 25 2006.

[A] new study published in the journal Brain details the remarkable ability of the thinking organ to regenerate itself and regain function when its host chooses the path of sobriety. The research also underscores a key warning — quit now, or risk damage that could be harder to reverse....

Those studies have established that alcoholism can cause significant loss of short-term memory skills and of higher-order functions such as reasoning, planning and prioritizing. In adults as well as adolescents, alcohol abuse was associated with changes in the brain — in particular in the prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher reasoning.

The most well-documented alcohol-related impairments occur in a drinker's visual-spatial skills — those that allow us to drive, read a map and orient ourselves in three-dimensional space. A Stanford University study published in August found that although middle-aged alcoholics who had been abstinent for as little as six months regained virtually all lost function on measures of abstraction, attention, memory, reaction time and verbal skills, the damage to their visual-spatial skills was not so easily undone.

Studies have found that women are particularly vulnerable to the cognitive effects of alcoholism, and that smoking tobacco during recovery can significantly hamper the brain's process of self-repair.

The study is in the Dec. 18 online edition of the journal Brain.

technorati tags:alcohol, smoking, cognition, tobacco, visuospatial, brain, addiction, substance, alcoholism, mind

Brain Fitness Industry

As Minds Age, What's Next? Brain Calesthenics

Pam Belluck

New York Times

excerpt:

From “brain gyms” on the Internet to “brain-healthy” foods and activities at assisted living centers, the programs are aimed at baby boomers anxious about entering their golden years and at their parents trying to stave off memory loss or dementia.

“This is going to be one of the hottest topics in the next five years — it’s going to be huge,” said Nancy Ceridwyn, co-director of special projects for the American Society on Aging. “The challenge we have is it’s going to be a lot like the anti-aging industry: how much science is there behind this?

Many organizations are described as being interested:
AARP, the Alzheimer's Association, Apple, Lockheed Martin, Metlife, Humana, Emeritus Assisted Living, National Institute on Aging,
Products: Posit Science, Maintain Your Brain (Alzheimer's Assn)

Nintendo: Brain Age,

Websites: HappyNeuron.com, MyBrainTrainer.com

Researchers: Marilyn Albert (Hopkins), Lynda Anderson (CDC), Davind Loewenstein (U of Miami), Paul Nussbaum, Nancy Ceridwyn (American Society on Aging)

“Right now,” said Dr. Marilyn Albert, director of cognitive neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, “we can’t say to somebody, ‘We know that if you walk a mile every day for the next six months, your memory’s going to be better.’ We don’t know that if you do certain kinds of puzzles it’s going to have a benefit.”

(photo credit: susan_NYC)

technorati tags:aging, antiaging, brain, brainfitness, mentalaging, brainaging, alzheimers, AD, dementia, gerontology

US military contractors stock rises

Items from today's New York Times

Heady Days for Makers of Weapons
New York Times
December 26, 2006
Leslie Wayne

Excerpts:

THESE are very good times for military contractors. Profits are up, their stocks are rising and Pentagon spending is reaching record levels....

 Next year’s Pentagon budget is expected to exceed $560 billion...

And no one expects Democrats, in the last two years of the Bush administration, to make major changes, especially with the war continuing. Democrats are sensitive to the charge of being “soft” on defense...

Evidence of the industry’s good fortune is reflected in the stocks of major contractors over the last year. At the end of 2005, the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the largest contractor, was trading around $62 a share. Now Lockheed is around $92 a share. Over the last year, Boeing, which holds the No. 2 position, saw its shares rise from about $66 a share to around almost $89 a share. Meanwhile, Raytheon stock has risen from around $39 a share to more than $53 a share in the last year and General Dynamics has gone from the high $50s a share to almost $74 a share over the same period.

technorati tags:DOD, Defense, military, contractors, stockprices, budget, war

Doctor's view of Public Health

Preventive maintenance is always cheaper than neglect and repairs following the flood, but it always is held in lower esteem.    The public perception of public health versus clinical medicine is no exception.

For example,  according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta,

Since 1900, the average lifespan of persons in the United States has lengthened by greater than 30 years; 25 years of this gain are attributable to advances in public health. [1]

Even most of the advances against infectious diseases, often mistakenly attributed to wonder drugs,  actually occurred between 1900 and 1950, before widespread use of antibiotics, and were due to improvements in sanitation - clean water and sewage disposal systems. Again, very important areas but held in very low regard.

And, looking at the well-documented fact that the Latter Day Saints in Cache County Utah have life expectancies about 10 years longer than the average US citizen, [3]  very likely related to their mutual social support and their prohibition against use of alcohol or tobacco,   there are further substantial advances in life-expectancy the rest of the country could experience that have nothing whatsoever to do with high-tech medicine.

Despite these undisputed facts, public health seems to have no public relations skills at all, compared to the American Medical Association marketing of clinical medicine.

Even an MD with a background in epidemiology at the CDC, such as Lawrence Altman, a writer for the New York Times, can speak of public health in a positive light only with great difficulty, even though it is where he ends his review of the century.

Here's an excerpt from Dr. Altman's "The Doctor's World" for Dec 26, 2006, in the New York times titled "So Many Advances in Medicine, so Many Yet to Come."

Though doctors have long stressed the importance of prevention and public health, they and society have been slow to take strong action. Our medical school class was lucky to have a good course in preventive medicine because epidemiology was not widely taught elsewhere. To me, Berton Rouche, the New Yorker writer, arguably taught doctors more about public health than all medical schools combined through his medical detective stories about infectious and communicable diseases.

At the time, anyone who went into preventive medicine and public health was assumed to have graduated at the bottom of the class. A shingle on Park Avenue was the measure of success, not saving lives in poor countries. Now students are eager to study global health.

We may snicker over Eisenhower’s treatment. But imagine the laughter in 2056 as people look back at the brand of medicine and public health that we consider so sophisticated today. For all that doctors have learned in the last half-century, we are ignorant about far more.

The good news is that the new president of the AMA, Ronald Davis MD,  has a specialty in preventive medicine, as the country is being forced, by the huge health care bill, to start looking at the evidence and hard facts of what constitutes cost-effective health care.

At the current time, under 2% of the country's 1.2 $trillion health care budget is spent on prevention - and the rest goes to heroic repair after the damage has been done. 

Maybe, we need to re-examine that equation and, as CIS's Gil Grissom might say,  "let the data speak to us."   Spending more on public health is undoubtedly the most cost-effective step we could take - it's just has such bad press that it seems to be counter-intuitive.

================

references:

[1] This Health Fact from MedicineNet.com is based on:

Ten Great Public Health Achievements -- United States, 1900-1999
Published in MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Reference: MMWR 1999;48(12);241-243

Medical Detectives by Berton Rouche (paperback, 1991), is a great read, by the way, filled with fun and fascinating true CIS-type stories involving everything from blue people to poisonous tomatoes.

[3] Cache County study of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), (and many publications) from a
report appears in the February 2006 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society,
quoted at "Healthy LIfestyles Pay Dividents Well into Old Age".  Excerpt from the review

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 28 (HealthDay News) -- Americans are living longer than ever, and by modifying their lifestyles they can also live healthier, happier lives well into their 80s, researchers report.

In a new study, researchers found that in a predominantly Mormon county in Utah, the majority of people reported enjoying good or excellent health, even past age 85. In addition, their later life is not necessarily a steady decline in health, but rather more healthy years followed by a short period of ill health right before death.

Historical view: (about 20 years ago)

Testimony on the President's FY 1988 Budget Request for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by Dr. David Satcher
Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Yet as the U.S. health care budget approaches $1 trillion, only one percent of health expenditures support population-based prevention (chart 2).

Current Statistics: CDC NCHS - National Center for Health Statistics

2003 total US Health expenditures: $1.7 trillion (15.3% of the GDP)

Percent of health expenditures for hospital care: 31

Percent of health expenditures for nursing home care: 7

Percent of health expenditures for physician and clinical services: 22

Percent of health expenditures for prescription drugs: 11

Health, United States, 2004 (comprehensive statistics and comparisons to other countries)

technorati tags:CDC, publichealth, budget, prevention, medicine, advances, sanitation, epidemiology, rouche, detectives, EIS, Altman

Influenza - Flu - Before Holiday Travel

Here's the CDC's current weekly flu map before holiday travel, which will probably spread it much more widely in the next two weeks. The map shown is for the week ending December 16th.) Data takes about a week to collect, more time over holidays.

technorati tags:flu, flumap, map, influenza, epidemiology, contagious, infectious, homelandsecurity

Presenteeism - sick workers help flu spread

Sniffling, sneezing and Turning Cubicles into Sick Bays

Dec 26, 2006

New York Times

Excerpts (emphasis added)

Ailing employees are dragging themselves to work in increasing numbers, according to several studies. So widespread is the phenomenon that experts have invented a name, calling it presenteeism, the opposite of absenteeism.

Only half of workers in the United States earn paid sick days, and only one-third receive paid time to care for sick children, according to a recent report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The situation for low-wage and part-time workers is particularly acute. Only 23 percent of the lowest paid workers have paid sick days, the institute found; among restaurant workers, the figure is closer to 14 percent. Many risk losing their jobs should they take any sick time at all.

“These are often workers with a lot of public contact,” said Dr. Lovell, who wrote the report. “They are the retail clerks who ring up your purchase and people serving food at restaurants.”

In Congress, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, have announced plans to reintroduce the Healthy Families Act, which would require employers with 15 or more workers to offer at least seven days of paid sick leave each year. “It will make a major difference in the lives of working families,” Ms. DeLauro said.

Also noted: Phenomenon being studied by Dr. Cheryl Koopman, psychiatry, Stanford.

(photo credit: dogfaceboy )

technorati tags:Healthyfamilies, sickleave, presenteeism, koopman, flu, influenza, transmission, contagion, spread, security, homelandsecurity

Healthcare suffers at L.A. jails

Healthcare suffers at L.A. jails

By Scott Glover and Matt Lait

Los Angeles Times Staff Writers (California, USA)

12:07 AM PST, December 24, 2006

Excerpts:

The Los Angeles County Jail system lacks enough doctors, nurses and other medical workers to meet the most basic needs of inmates, resulting in long delays in treatment for conditions ranging from hernias to heart disease.

"We face unique challenges, and we do the best we can," Smith said. "These are difficult, angry, messed-up people. We try to treat people with the respect, not that they necessarily deserve, but that human decency demands."

Smith cited recent improvements in the quality of care: Medical records have been computerized, allowing for better tracking of doctors' orders, and distribution of prescription drugs has been automated, reducing medication errors. He said the department plans to launch a "telemedicine" program that will expand the reach of doctors by allowing them to remotely diagnose and treat inmates via computer and teleconference.

Smith acknowledged, however, that staffing shortages still exist and "bad outcomes" occur.

An average of about 200,000 people enter the county jails each year. On most nights, the population hovers around 18,000, with more than a third requiring medical care. Many are in fragile health because of drug abuse, homelessness or chronic illness. For some, the only time they see a doctor is when they're behind bars.

The county Sheriff's Department, which runs the jails, is required by state law to provide basic medical care to all inmates — 90% of whom have not been convicted of the charges against them.

"Today's jail population is older and sicker than it was a decade ago," Smith said. "The healthcare system is broken on the outside, and we see that in here."

"I could have every doctor in the county of Los Angeles here, and it still wouldn't be enough," said Sander Peck, chief physician in the jail system.

"The case ...llustrates how errors, oversights and inaction have contributed to inmate deaths."

Since 2005, the county has allocated about $20 million to hire 280 more nurses and 13 more doctors, officials said. The Sheriff's Department, however, has been unable to fill nearly 100 of those positions, in part because of competition from private hospitals and clinics.

That is the best that can be hoped for, he said, since inmates are not a political constituency.

"This is an underserved population for a reason," he said.

(photo credit: cjbj )

technorati tags:healthcare, hospitals, prison, jail, corrections, LA, California, penalsystem, inmates, safety, computerization, EHR, telemedicine

Reborn on the streets of LA - Latino Catholicism

The New York Times magazine lead article today was a very long look at the resurgence of Catholicism in California, and how that relates to Mexican immigration, problems of poverty, and problems of social justice and violence.

It has been said that clinical health looks at the best way to repair gunshot wounds in the Emergency Room, and public health goes outside to see what all the shooting is about, and how to stop it. In that sense, the Catholic Church appears to be filling a gap and serving a major public health role in California.

If nothing else, it shows that the Catholic Church is a trusted, credible communication channel that reaches into these communities.

With my fascination with "self-organizing structures" and "feedback systems" I've also pulled out a few quotes from that great reference article that highlight how these activities interact to produce a rapidly resurgent church and community that deals with violence without making it worse in the process.

As with the Positive Psychology movement in management, it also shows that emotional and spiritual factors can be pivotal in holding a group of people together so they can accomplish tasks in hostile environments.

Excerpts from

The New York Times online (nytimes.com)

December 24, 2006

Nuevo Catholics

by David Rieff

... When I spoke on a recent Sunday to Msgr. Jarlath Cunnane, or Father Jay, as he is known by his congregation, he said: “If we had the space, I think another thousand people might well come to each Sunday Mass. We’re full, bursting at the seams, and so are most churches in the archdiocese.”

This news comes as something of a surprise, given the fact that the last four decades have been such a catastrophe for American Catholicism.

For if the priests are cut from much the same ethnic cloth as they were a generation ago, their parishioners are not: out of the eight Masses celebrated at St. Thomas every Sunday, seven are in Spanish, ... Parish business is routinely done bilingually,...or another language of recent Catholic immigrants, like Tagalog or Vietnamese) as well as in English.

As Fernando Guerra, a professor at Loyola Marymount University, has said, churches in Los Angeles now fall into two categories: they “are either Latino or in the process of becoming Latino.” Although the trend is not as extreme in other parts of the country, it is being reproduced almost everywhere in Catholic America to one degree or another.

The vast increase, both proportionally and in absolute numbers, is mostly because of the surge in immigration from Latin America, above all from Mexico,

Nowhere is this clearer today than in Los Angeles.

Roger Mahony, the current cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles, likes to point out that the United States is reaching “the greatest levels of immigration in our nation’s history,” and to him and others in the church hierarchy, the new arrivals herald a rebirth of American Catholicism. Many within the church also say that these new arrivals could reverse the trend toward more tolerant attitudes on issues like contraception and abortion — what orthodox believers dismissively call cafeteria Catholicism. If Los Angeles is the epicenter for the astonishing Hispanicization of the American Catholic Church, it is also the site of a return to orthodoxy.

Then, as now, priests routinely described their immigrant parishioners as possessed of traditional family values, a deep historical as well as spiritual connection to Catholicism and a belief that the church would look after their best interests.

As Cunnane put it, “The renewal we’ve experienced has not just been in numbers but in terms of vibrancy of faith and in the sense of community.”

The organizing tool that many priests in Los Angeles use, which is to form groups of neighbors into communidades de base, or base communities, was itself one of the fundamental innovations of liberation theology. Within certain orders active in Los Angeles, above all the Jesuits, campaigns for social justice continue to loom large...

But the social message embedded in the scriptural passages, above all the call for justice and a validation of the dignity of the poor — that is to say of the parishioners themselves — evoked the strongest reactions.

He added: “Our effort is part of what it means for us to build the kingdom of God. Our engagement in civic life helps that happen. We don’t see this as separate from our religious vocation but essential to it.”

as Monsignor O’Connell put it, “for many immigrants, the church is the mediating institution they trust the most, in which they feel they already have a foothold and are treated with respect.” O’Connell himself spends a great deal of his time trying to serve as a go-between linking the immigrant community, including those who are in the United States illegally, with the local authorities. Many people in his parish, he told me, “exist in an underground economy, a cash economy. They also live in a culture in which there is a lot of gang violence. What we often do is go into a neighborhood, say Mass and then talk with people about the issues that most concern them. Often, that means crime. So we will try to bring them to meet with the local police captain. The effort is meant to give them a stronger voice in the local community.”

The Catholics’ vision emphasized social justice, and while it encouraged people to organize themselves, it also at least implicitly made demands on them (and had high expectations of the state).

... the Catholic Church ...has such a long-developed social gospel and such an elaborate language for advocating for it,

On the grass-roots level, that activism has taken, and continues to take, many forms, ranging from the month of prayer and fasting that the Dolores Mission initiated when an anti-immigration bill sponsored by Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, passed in the House of Representatives to lobbying for labor rights and immigrants’ rights in Washington to participating in the mass rallies for immigrants’ rights that took place in Los Angeles last spring.

(St. John’s is in Ventura County, in the heart of avocado-growing country, and the vast agricultural work force is almost entirely Latino).

Mahony divides the history of his own engagement into two periods: the time before 1965, when, as he puts it, “I was mostly aware of the immigrants’ pastoral needs,” and the years since, when, he says, “the church became more and more involved in social-justice issues for immigrants.” ...1962, during the period when Cesar Chavez began his campaign for farm workers’ rights in earnest. Mahony was close to Chavez, ... in 1975 — Gov. Jerry Brown named him to head up the newly formed California Agricultural Labor Relations Board. In effect, he became the lead negotiator in a series of labor disputes that culminated in the edgy peace between growers and farm workers that persists to this day.

s a result, the church has shifted its emphasis from labor rights for legal residents of the United States to the rights of immigrants. Mahony views this mission as one that is biblically ordained. In a recent speech at St. John’s, he said, “If you look today to see who are the most vulnerable, these are the same ones who are singled out by the prophets: people in poverty, single mothers, children and immigrants.” In other words, he said, “the challenge of the prophets is for us here and now.”

For Mahony, there is nothing new about this. “The church,” he told me, “has been doing direct service for centuries and doing advocacy as well.” But there is little doubt that the Sensenbrenner bill and the rise of virulent nativist feeling in America, above all on conservative talk radio, played a role in galvanizing the Los Angeles archdiocese and Mahony personally. The church had already been campaigning hard, but, the cardinal told me, the immigration restrictionists in Congress “teed up for us a home run by passing a bill so unlike the spirit of America.”

As a practical matter, the church’s commitment to the immigrant cause now far transcends any individual’s commitment, even the cardinal’s.

The story of the Virgin of Guadalupe .... By extension, the “Guadalupist” perspective embodies the church’s concern for the poor.

What is taking place in Los Angeles is an erasing of the border between Catholicism in the United States and Catholicism in the rest of the Americas.

The Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit who ran the Dolores Mission when things were at their roughest in East L.A. and who now heads up Homeboy Industries, a group that helps gang members (their slogan is “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job”), summed it up when he said, “As a priest, you’re always connecting the Gospel to people’s lives.”

The Times article is filled with details and examples and I recommend taking the holiday season to read the whole thing.

technorati tags:LA, losangeles, catholic, catholocism, immigration, California, church, socialactivism, activism, poverty, gangs, gangwarfare, community, organizing, Chavez, farmworkers, Spanish, Latino, language

Robots could demand legal rights (BBC)

The BBC recently noted that groups forecasting the future for the British government predict that robots might, in our lifetime, demand legal rights and even health care, or be drafted into military service.

The story, Robots could demand legal rights notes on Dec 21, 2006,

We're not in the business of predicting the future, but we do need to explore the broadest range of different possibilities to help ensure government is prepared in the long-term and considers issues across the spectrum in its planning," said Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser.

I should probably add this story to my "MAWBA - Might as Well be Alive" weblog.

The idea of giving robots legal rights is not nearly as far fetched as you might think.

Right now, the Western legal system has already encompassed and given rights to other non-human things, which constantly press for more. In my judgement we are just on the tipping point of having to deal with many more issues of metalife, or corporations, or things that "might as well be alive" because they act like they are alive and end up being treated that way.

If you hadn't notice it, the semi-living thingies called "corporations" have their own legal rights, completely independent of the rights of the humans that make them up. For example, tobacco ads are legal near elementary schools because the industry successfully argued that not to do so violated the company's first amendment rights.

Hmm. We don't recall in the US Constitution where it describes how many votes each corporation gets, but there is a distinct impression that Congress increasingly pays more attention to how corporations vote than how individual humans vote.

But, let's get back to the question of robots. Surely they aren't "alive" are they? Why should they get to vote? And, if they can vote, and "size doesn't matter", what if they replicate 100 billion of themselves and outvote us, and just take over that way?

A Google search for "rights of robots" yields 402 hits.

For example, KurzweilAI.net has an article on "The Rights of Robots: Exclusion and Inclusion in History and Future" by Sohail Inayatullah." The article also wonders if robots will become conscious, but self-consciousness is not a requirement for human voting.

A legal look at robot rights is posted in January, 1985 by Robert Freitas Jr. Here's what he says with highlighting added:

Under present law, robots are just inanimate property without rights or duties. Computers aren’t legal persons and have no standing in the judicial system. As such, computers and robots may not be the perpetrators of a felony; a man who dies at the hands of a robot has not been murdered. (An entertaining episode of the old Outer Limits TV series, entitled “I, Robot,” involved a court trial of a humanoid robot accused of murdering its creator.)

But blacks, children, women, foreigners, corporations, prisoners, and Jews have all been regarded as legal nonpersons at some time in history. Certainly any self-aware robot that speaks English and is able to recognize moral alternatives, and thus make moral choices, should be considered a worthy “robot person” in our society. If that is so, shouldn’t they also possess the rights and duties of all citizens?

But if Corporations are recognized as having "rights" and being legally "persons" under the law in some circumstances, then what if it turned out that robots ran such a corporation?

When you look at it, the whole idea of corporations being legally "persons" under the law sort of snuck in under the radar on us. A discussion is given by Patricia Werhane in Persons, Rights, and Corporations. (Prentice Hall).

Another interesting read is "Dismantling the barriers to legal rights for non-human animals" by Steven Wise. Indeed, in many cities cats and dogs appear to have greater rights and protection under the law than children. Humans have been fined or imprisoned for injuring or killing dogs, kittens, and a few years ago in Michigan a park-goer was charged with killing a rattlesnake in his path. Are these different rights than the rights of Dogwood trees to not be killed off?

For that matter, do "residents" have different legal rights than "non-residents", or "citizens" have different rights than "illegal aliens", or patriots have different rights than "enemy combatants?"

Where lines are drawn as to who, or what, has rights, is not at all clear, both in terms of exclusions and inclusions. If a human had a mechanical hand, would he still have rights? Certainly. How about if he had a mechanical arm? Yes again. Suppose he had a mechanical heart? Yes still. Suppose 1/3 of his brain had been replaced in the year 2020 by synthetic neural network to regrow a region lost in an accident. Would he still be "human"? Where does it stop?

Suppose the next generation of humans all get tired of lugging around computers and cell phones and simply have wireless connectivity chips built into their brains at birth. Would they still be human? Sure.

How many would they, or "it" be? Hmmm.

The December 2006 issue of Connection Science (Vol 18 No 4) is a special issue on "Android Science" with articles such as that by David Calverley, "Android Science and anima rights, does an analogy exist?"

Meanwhile, we should go back and ponder again exactly what rights corporations have, and how they got to have such rights. The history is fascinating.

But we do have to wonder if humans are like the pig farmer who finally sells the "North 40 acres" to a housing developer, whereupon the new residents of the town outvote the farmer for running a smelly nuisance and throw him out and put in a shopping mall.

Having given rights to corporations, where does it stop? If we give rights to robots, where will that stop?

These are design questions, social questions, that we need to spend more time discussing, because the answers are not obvious and are going to be hotly debated, and, while we debate, a shift in rights is going to be going on anyway.

We don't even know how to have that conversation yet. We don't even have a basic vocabulary for describing things that act like they are alive, like corporations, but then do things like "merge" or "divide into three parts." We don't even know how to count.

So, how long will it be that we move from GM's current complaint that "$1,500 of the price of every car is due to employee or retiree health care costs" to "$1,500 of every smart car is due to universal health care coverage for all legal persons, which now includes corporations and, of course, smart cars. The bill was passed after a very successful and clever lobbying effort by the cars themselves, which were tired of relying on humans to remember to change their oil, etc."

If corporations are legal "persons" under US law, then, if we get universal health care, are corporations entitled to government payments for whatever services corporations require to maintain their internal workings, fitness, and "health"?

Once we start sliding the term "legal person" around to cover entities that are composite meta-beings like corporations, we need to figure out how to slide the term "health" around as well, and get way more serious about defining what, exactly, "a healthy corporation" or "a healthy nation" means, legally, practically, physically.

(Photo credit: Dan Coulter )

technorati tags:robots, rights, robotrights, animalrights, MAWBA, metabeings, systems, nestedsystems, law, consciousness, AI, intelligence, voting, power, influence, future

Rumors US plans to reinstate the draft are unfounded

According to the New York Times the rumours that US residents will be drafted into the armed forces again are unfounded. Although the government is talking about a "surge" in forces and a "permanent" increase in the size of the Army, it won't be accomplished by impressing people into service against their will.

The NY Times article

Flurry of Calls about Draft, and a Day of Denials

Eric Lichtblau

Dec 23,2006

states

What prompted all this was a Hearst wire service article noting that the Selective Service was making plans for a “mock” draft exercise that would use computerized models to determine how, if necessary, the government would get some 100,000 young adults to report to their local draft boards.

The mock computer exercise, last carried out in 1998, is strictly routine, Selective Service officials said...

And goes on,

With President Bush saying that he wants to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps, the military strained near the breaking point and the secretary of veterans affairs suggesting publicly this week that a reconstituted draft could “benefit” the country, even the notion of a mock exercise seemed to strike a nerve.

The phrasing "get young adults to report" instead of "get young men to report" in the announcement reflects the fact that, unlike the Vietnam draft, a new draft would tend to be "equal opportunity" - at least for heterosexuals.

It would present some problems if declared homosexuality was accepted as a legitimate reason for a deferment, or if the draft pool was limited to Christians.

Also, "young adults" goes well beyond 18 year olds, because, with a new very high-tech military, a college degree is almost a requirement for many positions.

Still, it's not clear this addresses the right problem. The military did its job extraordinarily well in toppling Saddam Hussein and declaring military victory in a few short weeks. They won!

At that point this became a non-military problem of nation building and unification, which is what has been a disaster.

So, shouldn't we be talking about increasing the size and skill level of the peacefare force, not the warfare force?

How about the government paying for a new course in Mideast Studies to be taught to every college student so we all understand the issues more completely?

How about putting out a DoD request for proposals for "weapons of unification" that would allow Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and Haliburton to get multibillion dollar contracts in various congressional districts for development of concepts and tools that actually increase our ability on the nation-building and infrastructure-management front?

It seems that equal time should be given to discussing that question.

And, the next time we have a Katrina-level natural disaster, we can try out those tools and see if FEMA, so equipped, can do a better job. That is to say, investment in such tools is "dual purpose" in the good sense, that we can use these tools at home and perfect them in practice.

If we had spent as much on development of nation-building tools as we spent on infrastructure destruction tools, wouldn't we be in a much better position today, or maybe already done and out of there with a clear "victory"?

technorati tags:draft, military, army, war

NYT - Parenting as Therapy for Childhood Mental Disorders

The New York Times had a long article today on behavioral therapy as an adjunct to or replacement for medications for treatment of childhool mental disorders including depresion. It reflects a trend recognizing the role that external, psychosocial factors and interactions have on internal physiology over time.

Parenting as Therapy for Child's Mental Disorders

Benedict Carey

New York Times

Excerpt

But the science behind nondrug treatments is getting stronger. And now, some researchers and doctors are looking again at how inconsistent, overly permissive or uncertain child-rearing styles might worsen children’s problems, and how certain therapies might help resolve those problems, in combination with drug therapy or without drugs.

The psychotherapy techniques intended for the improvement of interactions between parents and children have been used mostly for children who suffer from attention disorders or who exhibit aggressive or defiant behavior. But recently, mental health professionals have been studying their use for families whose children suffer from depression or other mood problems.

In a comprehensive review, the American Psychological Association urged in August that for childhood mental disorders, “in most cases,” nondrug treatment “be considered first,” including techniques that focus on parents’ skills, as well as enlisting teachers’ help.

And in its just-completed guidelines, even the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, an organization whose members strongly favor drug treatment, recommends that children receive some form of talk therapy before being given drugs for moderate depression, a very common complaint.

(photo credit: Mary_Cabbie )

technorati tags:depression, children, psychiatry, psychosocial, systems, processcontrol, behavior, CBT, drugs, medication, treatment

Emergency Room nurse weblog

I've linked to an Emergency Department nurse's weblog: http://emergiblog.com

She volunteers the following information, which looks like a nice template.

1. Who runs this site?

Emergiblog is run by Kim, a registered nurse with an ADN degree and (currently) 28 years experience who has spent the last 15 years working in emergency departments.

2. Who pays for the site?

The site is provided to me through Three:Twenty Interactive, run by Shane Pike. I use WordPress for the blog and linking.

Shane maintains the “look” of the site; I have total control over the content.

I, as well as my webmaster Shane, receive renumeration from the ad links and actual contracts with specific companies arranged through Three:Twenty Interactive.

I have no financial interest in any of these companies, other than what they pay me to advertise on my site. As of this time, I have not received any gifts from any companies that advertise on Emergiblog.

3. What is the purpose of the site?

The purpose of Emergiblog is to give me a forum to discuss my experiences as a nurse in the emergency department and other topics related to nursing.

4. Where does the information come from?

It comes from my 28 years of nursing experience.

The majority of my posting is anecdotal.

All patients, staff and hospitals are either composites or have identifying information concealed or altered to allow for patient confidentiality.

If you think you recognize someone on the site, you are mistaken.

When applicable, links to information sources are given.

5. What is the basis of the information?

Please refer to question number four.

6. How is the information selected?

The postings are based on what I want to write about and what I feel will be interesting to read.

7. How current is the information?

It could be as current as my last shift or as long ago as my childhood.

8. How does the site choose links to other sites?

My links are based solely on sites I have read and found interesting.

9. What information about you does the site collect, and why?

The site collects no information about anyone other than what is recorded on the site meters.

That information is used just for my own personal interest in seeing where my readers come from and keeping track of how much traffic Emergiblog generates.

10. How does the site manage interactions with visitors?

Hopefully they comment and I comment back! Spammers are blocked by using special software.

All opinions are welcome and only posts containing profanity would be removed

technorati tags:nurse, nursing, blogs, weblog, blogging, ER, ED, emergencyroom

Steps towards national unity in Iraq

One of the most visible examples of where we desperately need a better understanding of how to achieve a coherent identity and unity that embraces diversity is the situation in Iraq today.

That we have a situation that calls for "nation building"or "national unity" is widely recognized now.  It's also increasingly being recognized that the best a military force can do in that regard is to provide a temporary context of safety within which to create such organic coherence among such differing groups of people with so many grudges still echoing through the pipelines.

The doctor may be able to put the ends of the bone back next to each other and hold them in place, but it is an organic healing process that has to happen then, unless you want to wear a cast forever.

So, again, the question comes right to the top - who knows what about how to actually make such an organic healing process happen, period, at all, on any scale, in any theoretical framework or model?  

What are the basic scientific principles involved here that we can fall back to confidently and start our design from?   What would that specialty be called? What's it listed under in the phone book or on the web?  

What do we know from extensive evidence and research will "always work"?

I'd suggest that we'd get farther if we start with general principles of organic coherence that we know always work, regardless of situation, and then put our energy into applying those principles to the particular situation in Iraq.   What is coherence? What holds it together?  How do we measure it?  Is it a valid construct?  Can we at least tell for sure whether it is increasing or decreasing, so we can guide action by outcomes?

What does coherence typically look like when it is in place?  What does it look like when it is embryonic or develomental?  What does it look like when it is falling apart? What are the most important issues in a stable, reliable, robust intervention based on implementation of coherence building?

If we know those answers, possible policies could be evaluated against them. If we don't know those answers, even if it is too late for this conflict,  we should form a note to oursleves to put more resources into  getting them so we'll have them next time.

These are major questions faced by every government - what does it take to "Hold the center together" against all the diverse centrifugal forces that are trying to rip the country into little warring factions?   France cares about this. China cares. The US cares, and frets about issues such as a national language (English?) or a national religion, or national values, or what exactly it is that works?  The US Episcopal church seems be be shredding into a civil war over differences.  Everyone cares about how unity can be maintained while not destroying diversity in the process.

We need to pool our fragments of wisdom, whether from recent science or history or religion, on what it takes to bring and hold people together,  aside from destructive repression and very tall walls that, at best, can keep the herd in one pasture.

We need to reach out to any natural models we have for design concepts that seem to work in practice, from bird swarms to slime mold,  and see what "portable" concepts can be teased out underlying those observable results.

We have thousands of examples to draw on - the only problem is that our image has been broken into a thousand pieces, scattered across a thousand academic specialized disciplines that don't really talk much to each other, or read each other's literature.

So, again it's a bootstrap problem.  We could solve the problem easily if we all worked well together, that is, if only we had already solved the problem.  So, we will need to inch our way up a virtuous circle or spiral, slowly learning how to work as one to address the problem of how to work as one.

The good news is that even the very process of working on the problem gives us more information from one perspective about what feels like it is working and what doesn't feel right.  We can follow that socio-bio-feedback trail upwards into the mist.

We can retain hope that there is at least one solution, because we exist as humans, composite organisms of ten to the 12th cells, working as "one".  The fact that we're here at all to work on the problem tells us that there is an answer. It proves "feasiblity."

And, some metric of how well the "one-ness" works is that elusive thing we call "health", which has a lot to do with wholistic relationships, integration, coherence, systems thinking, etc.

I hope this discussion provides some thought that the question of the "health" of populations of people, organized into larger groups from relationships to families to neighborhoods to cultures or countries is a central question.   "Public health" is not about health for "poor people" - it is about whatever it is that is the upstream key to organic health for people, for families, for corporations and economic prosperity, for good decision making on all scales, and for national stability based on health not violence.

Our joint question is "What makes this stuff work?"

We need to compare notes.

technorati tags:unity, Iraq, solutions, publichealth

WP - Mental Workouts keep aging minds fit

Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds, Study finds

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 20, 2006; A01

Excerpts:

Ten sessions of exercises to boost reasoning skills, memory and mental processing speed staved off mental decline in middle-aged and elderly people in the first definitive study to show that honing intellectual skills can bolster the mind in the same way that physical exercise protects and strengthens the body.

The researchers also showed that the benefits of the brain exercises extended well beyond the specific skills the volunteers learned. Older adults who did the basic exercises followed by later sessions were three times as fast as those who got only the initial sessions when it came to activities of daily living, such as reacting to a road sign, looking up a number in a telephone book or checking the ingredients on a medicine bottle -- abilities that can spell the difference between living independently and needing help.

...[ brief training sessions seemed to confer enormous benefits as many as five years later. That would be as if someone went to the gym Monday through Friday for the first two weeks of the new year, did no exercise for five years, and still saw significant physical benefits in 2012.

The study did not indicate that mental training can hold off all cognitive decline permanently. Rather, as is the case with physical exercise, strengthening the mind appeared to slow decline.

Sherry L. Willis, the lead author of the study and a Pennsylvania State University professor of human development, said those who had the training also reported greater confidence in their ability to solve everyday problems, and this was especially true of the group that got the reasoning training.

The results, being published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are heartening, but Willis and Marsiske cautioned that the biggest challenge lies ahead, in getting people to apply the findings to their lives.

"It's just like physical exercise -- when we are approaching the new year we will buy a pass for the gym and go fervently in January and then slack off," Willis said. "Mental exercise is the same way. It has to be consistent, and it has to be challenging.

To reap the benefits, Willis said, people need to get outside their comfort zones.

(Photo credit: docman )

technorati tags:aging, cognitive, decline, AD, alzheimers, intelligence, exercise, JAMA, prevention, crossword, comfortzone, stretch, research, study

LA Times on ADD kids saying No

As children they were given Ritalin to help them concentrate. Now -- as adults -- they are choosing to say no to meds.

Many of the 'ADD generation' say no to meds

Newly minted grown-ups are carrying out a massive natural experiment by choosing to do without the drugs that profoundly affected their experience of childhood.

By Melissa Healy, LA Times Staff Writer
December 18, 2006

Excerpt:

It seems like only yesterday they were fidgeting in their seats, sprinting around their classrooms and daydreaming their way through addition and subtraction. Most, just like Barclay, struggled through elementary and middle school on Ritalin as the practice of medicating attention problems in children took off steeply in the United States: Between 1990 and 2005, production of the two stimulant compounds most used to treat ADD — methylphenidate and amphetamine — increased seventeenfold and thirtyfold, respectively.

Now many are choosing to do without the drugs that profoundly affected their experience of childhood and school and, in many cases, made it possible for them to learn alongside other kids in mainstream classrooms.

It is one of the first decisions of their adult lives. Mostly, it was parents who dictated whether and when they would start medications to sharpen their focus. But the decision to stay on or go off these drugs is one that these teens and young adults have made for themselves — with little research to guide them.

technorati tags:ADD, Ritalin, AttentionDeficitDisorder, ampnetamine, methylpenidate, college, students, collegestudents, psychiatry, mentalillness

Hyper-resonant teams

Several testable research hypotheses follow from the previous posts:

• Testable: Membership in a high-performance high-emotional coupling high-reliability learning team should be protective against depression.
• Testable: Such a membership in what I'll call a "hyper-resonant team" should also be protective against stress in general, and stress mediated health outcomes.  
  
• Testable: Such membership should be protective against all bad psychosocially mediate outcomes that are triggered by a loss of social interaction and positive social coupling.
  
• Testable: Such membership should result not only in a team that collectively has very high learning capacity, but in members that also, individually measured, over time,  demonstrate higher learning capacity than their "IQ" would predict.
• Testable:  such a team result in greater social problem solving and load-carrying capacity than working as separate individuals,  to the point where competing individuals would cry "foul" and "unfair!" if tested against the group effort.
• Testable: Such performance in hyper-resonance would be more due to capacity expansion than to problem division. That is, performance would be multiplied factorially,  not just problems divided up among the team members who then work separately in parallel.
• Testable: Such a team would not only be protective, it would also be an exquisitely sensitive detector of a drift of a member towards depression or any other psychological state that reduced their input and ability to reflect ideas postively back to the team.

"Hyper-resonance" is a term used in celestial mechanics to refer to the entrainment of some body by a very low force that you wouldn't think would have any effect, but, over the long term, dominates the outcome.      So, a planet that rotated exactly 3 times for every two revolutions around the sun would be "hyper-resonant".  The fact that the moon keeps the same face towards the earth all the time is surprising - where's the coupling torque that changes the rotation speed?

A key concept in aperture synthesis coherence is "phase-lock",  which only occurs in a "phase lock loop".   This is a feedback phenomenon that keeps different systems that could operate independently synchronized, even though they don't have to be. They're "entrained" to each other. This is a critical phenomenon to understand when looking at the behavior  or possible behaviors of tightly-coupled regulatory feedback systems.

So, in human cells, the DNA can be intentionally damaged in one cell and, if that cell is placed in a context of healthy cells, it can often continue to operate normally.  In some way it "borrows" the health of its neighbors in a "field effect."  

Is that just a property of cells? Probably not. It's probably a property of ANY coupled set of feedback-controlled regulatory circuits, regardless of scale.   If so, we should see such a phenomenon among humans.

• Testable: There is way more power in "I get by with a little help from my friends" than there "should be."
  

If even some of the above hypotheses are true,  this implies a totally new method parallel method of preventing the bad outcomes from stress and depression than "cognitive behavioral therapy" (CBT) and a lifetime of psychactive drugs.

What's good about this is that, once understood, it is highly scalable and probably something we can do for each other without needing a billiion psychiatrists to assist. Because these behaviors can result in massive increases in productivity and creative problem solving, corporations can be motivated to pay for this transformation in their own self interest.  It's not something that comes at the expense of corporate success.

There are definitely downside of peer group interactions, as the history in the 60's of T-groups demonstrated.  But the point is that there is an upside as well.  LIke cars, which can run off the road, they can also get us where we need to go. 

These hypotheses seem worth researching. There are people looking at the routes and health outcomes of positive psychology. One is the Positive Emotion and Pyschophysiology lab ( PEPLab at UNC  )run by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson.   Productive power of such teams is documented at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan by Professor Kim Cameron in "Positive Organizational Scholarship", mentioned in other posts here.

We need something to lift us by out bootstraps into the 21st century.  These initiatives don't take away from other good work, but provide a parallel and very interesting path to explore further with good, solid research.

technorati tags:hyperresonance, resonance, teams, organizations, groups, learning, hope, behavior, organizationalbehavior, teamwork, positivepsychology, psychology, positiveemotions, Fredrickson, UNC, psychphysiology, healtheffects, fieldeffects, cells