Pain effect of depression

Physical symptoms are nearly as common as emotional ones in patients suffering from depression, according to new research. Patients with depression frequently talk to their physicians about symptoms such as headache, back or muscle pain, stomach ache and dizziness instead of symptoms more commonly associated with depression such as fatigue, lack of motivation and moodiness. Physical symptoms also may serve as a barometer for physicians to gauge the effectiveness of common antidepressant treatments.

Death's guru

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist who famously theorized in 1969 that terminally ill patients go through five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - died Tuesday at her Scottsdale, Arizona home at age 78, of natural causes.

She came to New York and was appalled by hospital treatment of dying patients. She was best known for her 1969 book On Death and Dying,'' bringing the forbidden topic of terminal illness into the public consciousness, and became an icon to many in the gay community after she pioneered hospice care, creating a model for caring for the ill during the AIDS epidemic.

The most important thing Kubler-Ross did was bring death out of the dark.

Soda & diabetes

Things don't go better with Coke. Or Pepsi. Or any sugar-sweetened soft drink. That's according to a new study that links significant weight gain and higher risk of type 2 diabetes in women who drink soda daily.

Researchers at Harvard's School of Public Health tracked more than 91,000 women and found those who drank about a soda a day piled on 19 pounds over eight years.

They also increased their risk of developing type 2 diabetes -- the most common form -- by 83 percent compared to women who drank less than one soda a month. Diet colas were not linked to diabetes, nor were fruit juices that had no added sugars, said the study published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

The soft drink industry blasted the findings, noting that women who drank more sugary sodas also tended to smoke and eat more and exercise less than non-soda drinkers.

"It is scientifically indefensible to blame any one food or beverage for increasing the risk of type 2 diabetes," the American Beverage Association said in a statement.

While experts debate the reported soda-diabetes link, a nutritionist at Boston's Joslin Diabetes Center said she worries about the trend toward super-sized sodas.

Genetic alteration

[via FutureBrief]

"For a glimpse of what post-human athletes may look like beginning in the 2012 or 2016 Olympics, take a look at an obscure breed of cattle called the Belgian Blue.

"Belgian Blues are unlike any cows you've ever seen.

"They have a genetic mutation that means they do not have effective myostatin, a substance that curbs muscle growth. A result is that Belgian Blues are all bulging muscles without a spot of fat, like bovine caricatures of Arnold Schwarzenegger...

Gene therapy goes to the heart of an issue that will turn our species upside down in the coming decades. We are beginning to understand our own operating system - genes - and we're gaining the ability to try to 'improve' our genetic endowment. If we do so, the ramifications could be as enormous as when our ancestors first crawled out of the slime to live on land."

In this intriguing editorial, Nicholas Kristof explores the consequences of genetic alteration and whether it is really possible to "design" better humans. Read the editorial in the New York Times.

---

BuiltReport has a photolog here.

"Myostatin is a protein that normally inhibits muscle growth after a certain point of development.

"Pure Belgian Blue carry two copies of the gene.

"Scientists have already inhibited the Myostatin Gene in mice and are working on blocking the gene in humans in order to treat muscle wasting diseases."

---

Featured in Neatorama, Yann Arthus-Bertrand has a photo library with an impressive pic of a Belgian Blue hindquarters.

Nothing else to say

My thought of this war:


Waiting...

[link]

Revising psychiatry & drugs

According to Dr Frank:
"Everything we know about circadian rhythms suggests that sleep is the rhythm we can most easily manipulate."
[via Depression and Bipolar Weekly]

... regular sleep-wake cycles, doesn't necessarily mean conforming to the schedule of most of the rest of the world.

Create an association between the bed and sleep, Dr Frank advises. Bed is "not where you read your book, not where you watch television. A lot of Americans have established the habit of doing maybe 15 things in their bed. What we want is the Pavlovian response to being in the bed and putting your head down that will initiate sleep." (Sex is allowed.)

... discomfort is believed to translate into the interpersonal realm, where people tend to avoid social situations out of fear of a somatic meltdown. Dr Frank teaches patients strategies to make them more comfortable with arousal, and to address conflicts that otherwise would have been managed by avoidance.

... women who participated were mothers of children with psychiatric problems, a population not inclined to take the time to look after themselves.

... [after] meeting for eight years...in an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry Dr Frank and her co-authors made a strong case that bipolar and depression may be part of the same spectrum rather than discrete illnesses. The article was based on a study that found there were 12 items associated with hypomania (from high mood to irritability) that were each present in at least 40 percent of the depressed patients. Patients with a higher number of lifetime manic/hypomanic symptoms had a higher number of lifetime depressed symptoms (and vice-versa), a finding that held for both the bipolar and unipolar patients. Dr Frank acknowledges that she did not fully appreciate the subtleties of the mood spectrum until her collaboration with Giovanni Cassano MD at the University of Pisa.

System of management

[via NewsScan] Noted management consultant W. Edwards Deming has written:
"Western management in industry, education, government, is due for sweeping changes. The prevailing system of management has smothered the individual, and has consequently dampened innovation, applied science, joy in learning, joy in work. It will be necessary to restore dignity and self-esteem to the individual. This can be done, but only by transformation of the style of management now practiced.
"The prevailing forces of destruction start early in life-grades in school from toddler on up through the university, gold stars for school athletics, merit system or annual appraisal on the job, incentive pay, work standards, MBO (rather, MBIR: Management by Imposition of Results), MBR (Management by Results). These forces of destruction must be replaced by leadership...
"The change required is transformation, change of state, metamorphosis. The transformation will restore the individual; will abolish grades in school on up through the university; will abolish the annual appraisal of people on the job, MBO, quotas for production, specified requirements that people work 57 minutes out of every hour, incentive pay, monthly or quarterly reports on business targets, competition between people, competition between divisions, and other forms of suboptimisation. Leadership will replace these bad practices, and will restore the individual."

---

Ricardo Semler, who will be a guest lecturer at the Harvard Business School this summer, relishes the role of provocateur. For nearly 25 years, Ricardo Semler, CEO of Brazil-based Semco, has let his employees set their own hours, wages, even choose their own IT. The result: increased productivity, long-term loyalty and phenomenal growth. Can his radical approach work for you?

Gold, colloidials & water

In the early eighties, Charles Cooper and several other friends created eight 'gold mine claims' on the islands of the San Francisco Bay. We were using accepted technology where patents were about to expire plus innovative technology that still remains secret. It was clear to us that colloidial solids inside water molecules are a public natural resource. We wanted to point out that spilling contaminated fresh water from the great California drain of the Bay into the Pacific Ocean was an important scientific and technical problem. To model our claims, we used a simple windmill generator using the direct current to 'accrete' solids onto wire electrodes. We erected a 1400 square foot barge between Angel Island and the mainland penninsula for demonstration. It is now almost 25 years since these prototypes were demonstrated.

I feel as if the large engineering and corporate firms are foolish about water and water policy. I know that the large publishers and government are paying attention to water. I also know that along with the current oil scare there is a sidebar about an upcoming water crisis. These are the voices of utility firms -- something that most citizens rely upon but understand very little. President Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz said more than 20 years ago that he thought water prices would increase more than 500%. Of course, he also enjoyed a position on the board of Bechtel.

I also feel optimistic. We are a planet of water and most recently a planet of energetic technologists and scientists. As a team of social entrepeneuers in the 1980's, our hope building the gold mine claims was to energize an investigation into water, the 'universal molecule'.

I think we should keep our eyes open. I think we should support research into water technology, aware of the engineering conglomerates that want to build [another] era of supra-utility companies. Look at the links below. Simply designing what I call "stimulus architecture", there are opportunities to guide energy and build structures and controls throughout the world. These links describe techniques we were pioneering years ago:

Electricity Revives Coral

Alex posted last April about efforts to build and renew coral reefs using wire mesh and low-power electric currents, and noted that results weren't yet clear. Wired now reports that these grids have, in fact, been impressively successful:

The grids were then seeded with small fragments of live coral, which begin to grow "between five and 10 times faster than normal, with much brighter colors and more resilience to hot weather and pollution," said a co-owner of the Taman Sari Cottages, an American who goes by the single name Naryana.

Some corals have been transplanted directly onto the bars, attached by wires or wedged into specially designed spaces. Soft corals, sponges, tunicates and anemones were also transplanted. Vibrant colors and growth up to nearly a half inch in less than a month have been recorded. Grids that suffered power failures saw less vigorous development and duller colors.

"Today, the fish are back, including deepwater fish which come into the reef to rest during the daytime," Naryana said.

Coral reefs are critically important to maintaining healthy oceans, and are under increasing threat; it's good to know that we may have a way of keeping them around.

Lactic acid myth

Scientists in Australia and Denmark have discovered the mechanism by which acidity helps prevent muscle fatigue. The discovery runs in the face of the previously held belief among physiologists and athletes that acidity, through a build up of lactic acid, is a major cause of muscle fatigue. ''We found that muscles play a ''clever trick'' in which they use acidosis--the build-up of acid--to help ensure that they keep responding properly to nerve signals and so avoid the fatigue that would otherwise occur.''

Chronic fatigue update

CREATINE may increase energy: A Temple University researcher seeking physiological evidence of chronic fatigue syndrome has found a link between creatine and metabolic energy. The findings, which hold promise for future CFS treatments, were published in a recent issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology.

---

A new study has verified that there is physical evidence for those who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, giving new weight to the often stigmatized and misdiagnosed disorder. There are a number of medical professionals who don't believe that CFS exists. A University of Alberta study has verified that there is physical evidence for those who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome. Research published in the ''International Journal of Psychophysiology'' determined that, using independent criteria, CFS can be distinguished from depression--two disorders that share many of the same symptoms. CFS is an often debilitating disorder, characterized by a constellation of symptoms including fever, sore throat, headache, muscle weakness, myalgias, malaise, sleep and cognitive disturbances.

Bacteria clean up

I worked with the country's first executive to take the formal title of Environmental Director, for the firm Diamond Shamrock. He had developed over 300 strains of bacteria for various toxic cleanup tasks. I made presentations to various California and international agencies demonstrating that many types of toxic soils and waste could be incubated with bacteria for a highly economical and effective solution. We offered a site-built unit and another unit on a configurable flat trailer. But California in particular did not want to press the issue. Agencies had recently completed a compromise policy to let sites with toxic soils remain fallow, to let toxics reconstitute or outgas. This is why gas station lots sit chained and empty for years at a time. This passive policy hurt my business. Instead of having hundreds of sites for new business, I was immediately left with none. This project went fallow because I hadn't the funds to keep it going without an eager marketplace. Years later, I see that advances are still being made in bacterial solutions.

PCB breakdown in rivers depends on bacteria One of Mother Nature's most promising weapons to break down persistent, toxic PCBs is bacteria. Now, a study provides convincing evidence that how quickly a PCB gets eaten and what it becomes depends on where it settles. Using DNA fingerprinting, the team discovered distinct bacterial populations in...

Eyewitness failure

Eyewitness recall accuracy affected by mood

People in a negative mood provide more accurate eyewitness accounts than people in a positive mood. The surprise finding, which is to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, is the first to assess the effect of mood on memory and human thinking...

Help Make Blogs More Visible!

There are by some estimates more than 3 million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few "A-List" blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don't get noticed. But this posting could solve that. Let's help the smaller blogs get more visibility!

This posting is GoMeme 4.0. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.

Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Your blog will be part of the pat for everyone downstream from you. That way they can see where they got this message from. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!

Instructions: Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)

<>Path List
1. Minding the Planet
2. One Stop Thought Shop
3. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person). <>
(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)
August 05, 2004 | Permalink

Innocent fraud

Kenneth Galbraith has been at the center of the American economy since before the First World War. In this his new book, he offers a distillation of these years in both the public and the private sectors, the academy and the government, and explains where we are and how we got there. Galbraith argues that inherent in our economic system is a continuing divergence between reality and "conventional wisdom," or as he puts it self-serving belief and contrived nonsense, or "fraud." He contends that we observe the current state of the nation in a cloud of myth, believing that stockholders and owners run our corporate world. In reality, it is the management of giant corporations that controls not only the private sector, but also the public sector, too, from politicians, to the Federal Reserve Bank, to the Pentagon.

In a work filled with provocative ideas that come from his years as an astute observer, Galbraith looks at today's economy and America's military actions in Iraq and sees that the gap between myth and reality has never been wider.

Here is an edited extract from "
The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time"
by JK Galbraith sold on Amazon

Fraud within the American Economy:
The myth of stockholder ownership
The myth of a market economy
The myth of the Federal Reserve System
The myth of two sectors; public and private
The myth that war is justifiable

BBC Interviews

[via CoolTricks] The BBC has done it again. This time, by publishing an impressive collection of archived audio interviews online for all to enjoy.

Divided into such categories as actors, painters, religious thinkers, and others, visitors will find fascinating interviews on everyone from Ansel Adams to Bob Marley. The archive goes back a ways, so there's something for everyone to enjoy, young and old. And each respective person has several interviews available from different time periods, so users can get an interesting perspective on how they viewed things over the years.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/

Why such arrogance?

More manipulation and deceit

What exactly did the Iranians tell European diplomats last month

The story here is that while we're in the midst of the administration's passing off past sins on intelligence agencies, it is going right ahead with the same sort of manipulative and deceitful practices that have already caused the nation such grief. Mr. Bolton [undersecretary of state] is probably more guilty than any other member of this administration of repeated mistatements, exaggerations and distortions of intelligence about Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba and other countries regarding weapons of mass destruction and proliferation issues.

---

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Phil Agre is writing again:

"Some conservative rhetors have taken to literally demonizing the very notion of a democratic opposition. Rush Limbaugh has argued at length that Tom Daschle resembles Satan simply because he opposes George Bush's policies. Ever since then, Limbaugh has regularly identified Daschle as "el diablo". This is the emotional heart of conservatism: the notion that the conservative order is ordained by God and that anyone and anything that opposes the conservative order is infinitely evil."

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?
(via Red Rock Eater)

---

"A vote for Bush
is a vote for a divided, unstable, paranoid America"

Baby, we were born to run against Bush

More than 20 artists, including Bruce Springsteen, the Dave Matthews Band, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, James Taylor and the Dixie Chicks, announced the launch of a ``Vote For Change'' tour yesterday.

"A vote for Bush is a vote for a divided, unstable, paranoid America,'' Dave Matthews said in one of the more strongly worded statement.