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By José van Dijck

In 2006, there appeared to be a remarkable consensus among Internet gurus, activists, bloggers, and academics about the promise of Web 2.0 that users would attain more power than they ever had in the era of mass media. Rapidly growing platforms like Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) facilitated users’ desire to make connections and exchange self-generated content. The belief in social media as technologies of a new “participatory” culture was echoed by habitual tools-turned-into-verbs: buttons for liking, trending, following, sharing, trending, et cetera. They articulated a feeling of connectedness and collectivity, strongly resonating the belief that social media enhanced the democratic input of individuals and communities. According to some, Web 2.0 and its ensuing range of platforms formed a unique chance to return the “public sphere” — a sphere that had come to be polluted by commercial media conglomerates — back in the hands of ordinary citizens.

Eight years after the apex of techno-utopian celebration, a number of large platforms have come to dominate a social media ecosystem vastly different from when the platforms just started to evolve. It’s time for a reality check. What did social media do for the public — users like you — and for the ideal of a more democratic public space? Do they indeed promote connectedness and participation in community-driven activities or are they rather engines of connectivity, driven by automated algorithms and invisible business models?  Online socializing, as it now seems, is inimically mediated by a techno-economic logic anchored in the principles of popularity and winner-takes-all principles that enhance the pervasive logic of mass media instead of offering alternatives.

Most contemporary social media giants once started out as informal platforms for networking or “friending” (Facebook), for exchanging user-generated content (YouTube), or for participating in opinionated discussions (Twitter). It was generally assumed that in the new social media space, all users were equal. However, platforms’ algorithms measured relevance and importance in terms of popularity rankings, which subsequently formed the quantifiable basis of data-driven interactivity wrapped in “social” rhetoric such as following, trending, or sharing. In this platform-mediated ecosystem, sponsored and professionally generated content soon received a lot more attention than user-generated content. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook gradually changed their interfaces to yield business models that were staked in two basic variables: attention and user data. By 2012, once informal social traffic between users had become fully formalized, automated, and commoditized by platforms owned and exploited by fast growing corporate giants. Although each of these platforms nurses its own proprietary mechanisms, they are staked in the same values or principles: popularity, hierarchical ranking, quick growth, large traffic volumes, fast turnovers, and personalized recommendations. A like is not a retweet, but most algorithms are underpinned by the norms of popularity and fast-trending topics.

The cultivation of online sociality is increasingly dominated by four major chains of platforms: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. These chains share some operational principles even if they differ on some ideological premises (open versus closed systems). Some consider social media platforms as alternatives to the old mass media, praising their potential to empower individual users who can contribute their own opinions or content to a media universe that was before pretty much closed to amateurs. Although we should not underestimate this newly acquired power of the web as a publishing medium for all, it is hard to keep up the tenet that social media are alternatives to mass media. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly obvious that the logics of mass media and social media are intimately intertwined. Not just on the level of platforms mechanics and content (tweets have become the equivalent of soundbites) but also on the level of user dynamics and business models; YouTube-Google now collaborates with many former foes from Hollywood to turn their platform into the gateway to the entertainment universe. Newspapers and television stations are inevitably integrated in the ecosystem of connective media where the mechanisms of data-driven user traffic determines who and what gets most attention, hence drawing customers and eyeballs.

This new connective media system has reshaped the power relationships between platform owners and users, not only in terms of who may steer information but also who controls the vast amount of user data that rushes through the combined platforms every day. What are the larger political and social concerns behind deceptively simple interfaces and celebrated user-convenient tools? Where in 2006 the notion of user power still seemed unproblematic, the relationship between users and owners of social media platforms is now contentious and embattled. In the wake of the growing monopolization of niches (Facebook for social networking, Google for search, Twitter for microblogging) it is important to redefine and reappraise the meaning of “social,” “public,” “community,” and “nonprofit.” The ecosystem of connective media has no separate spaces for the “public”; it is a nirvana of interoperability which major players argue for deregulation and which imposes American neoliberal conditions on a global space where boundaries are considered disruptions of user convenience. Common public values, such as independence, trust, or equal opportunities, are ready for reassessment if they need to survive in an environment that is defined by social media logic.

José van Dijck is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam; her latest book, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media has just been published by Oxford University Press (2013).

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Image credit: 3D little human character X9 in a Network, holding Tablet Computer. People series. Image by jojje9999, iStockphoto.

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In 2010, Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old computer programmer and founder of Reddit, downloaded thousands of scholarly articles from the online journal archive JSTOR. He had legal access to the database through his research fellowship at Harvard University; he also, however, had a history of dramatic activism against pay-for-content online services, having previously downloaded and released roughly 100,000,000 documents from the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) database, which charges eight cents per page to access public files. Given his status as a prominent “hacktivist” and the sheer quantity of files involved, law enforcement agents concluded that Swartz planned to distribute the cache of articles and indicted him on multiple felony counts carrying a possible sentence of $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison.

Swartz was slated to go to trial this year but committed suicide in early January, prompting a public outcry against the prosecution in his case. Swartz was a prominent voice in the heated debate surrounding modern copyright law and public access and use (see his 2008 “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto”). New York’s current issue contains a great feature from Wesley Yang discussing Swartz’s activism, his life, and the controversy in which he was embroiled.

In the ongoing debate over Swartz’s prosecution, we’ve pulled together a brief reading list on the issues surrounding American copyright in the digital age from OUP’s stable:

Copyright’s Paradox by Neil Weinstock Netanel

Netanel weighs current IP law against the basic right of freedom of speech. Like Swartz, he finds it unacceptably constricting.

The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Intellectual Property by Dan Hunter

A concise overview of the current state and history of IP law in America from a prominent New York University IP expert.

Copyright and Mass Digitization by Maurizio Borghi and Stavroula Karapapa

Two UK scholars discuss “whether mass digitisation is consistent with existing copyright principles.”

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Senior Copyright Counsel at Google takes a look at the changing economic realities of the globalizing, digitizing world and concludes that our government must “remake our copyright laws to fit our times.”

Democracy of Sound by Alex Sayf Cummings

An overview of music piracy stretching back to the advent of recorded sound. The RIAA made headlines throughout the last decade by litigating against users who shared music online, but musicians, record companies, songwriters, and fans were navigating this territory for nearly a century before the Internet became a factor.

Unfair to Genius: The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein by Gary Rosen

The story of one early 20^th century musician who spent decades conducting high-profile lawsuits against the leading pop icons of the day. Though he never won a single case, Ira Arnstein managed to have a significant impact on the shape of music copyright through the decisions in his numerous cases.

Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain by Robert Spoo

Spoo homes in on the contested publication of Ulysses to reveal the impact on copyright of literary modernism (and vice versa). Characters such as Ezra Pound, the infamous publisher Samuel Roth, and of course James Joyce flesh out a revealing story about artists grappling with free speech and authorship.

Oxford University Press is committed to developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners in all areas of the law. Our practitioner programme continues to grow, with key texts in commercial law, arbitration and private international law, plus the innovative new ebook version of Blackstone’s Criminal Practice. We are also delighted to announce the new edition of the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, one of the most trusted reference resources in international law. In addition to the books you can find on this page, OUP publishes a wide range of law journals and online products.

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The 11th of February marks the opening of Westminster Kennel Club’s 137th Annual All Breed Dog Show. First held in 1877, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is America’s second-longest continuously held sporting event, behind only the Kentucky Derby. The Westminster Dog Show epitomizes our long-standing tradition of domestication of dogs, but how did we arrive at such a moment in human and dog relations? The Encyclopedia of Mammals, edited by David MacDonald, offers some explanation as to how this species went from being wild prey-hunters to “best in show,” and from defending territories to defending last year’s titles.

The Dog Family

Canids originated in North America during the Eocene (55–34 million years ago), from which five fossil genera are known.

Canids evolved for fast pursuit of prey in open grasslands, and their anatomy is clearly adapted to this life. Although the 36 species and 13 genera vary in size from the tiny fennec fox to the large gray wolf, all but one have lithe builds, long bushy tails, long legs, and digitigrade, four‐toed feet with nonretractile claws.

Life in the Pack

The most striking feature of the canids is their opportunistic and adaptable behavior. This is most evident in the flexible complexity of their social organization. Remarkably, there is in this respect almost as much variation within as between species. Though African wild dogs, and possibly dholes and bush dogs, almost always hunt in packs, gray wolves, coyotes, and jackals feed on prey ranging from ungulates to berries. Partly as a result, they lead social lives that vary from solitary to sociable – gray wolves may live in isolated monogamous pairs, or in packs of up to 20 members.

These species, and some others like red and arctic foxes, live in groups even where large prey does not abound and where they hunt alone. Indeed, there are many other reasons for group living – cooperative defense of territories or large carcasses, communal care of offspring, rivalry with neighboring groups. This is clearly illustrated by the Ethiopian wolf, which lives in packs but almost never hunts cooperatively, its prey being largely rodents.

Dogs under Threat

For all their adaptability, members of the dog family cannot escape the indirect threat of habitat destruction. The small‐eared dog and the bush dog are seen so rarely that there are fears for their futures. The Ethiopian wolf numbers some 500 individuals, the African wild dog 5,000 individuals, and the maned wolf a few thousand in its Argentine and Brazilian strongholds. These species are all threatened. The plight of the sociable canids is especially intense insofar as they are victims of the so‐called Allee Effect – that is, at low numbers they enter a downward spiral to extinction. African wild dogs depend on cooperation, so packs with fewer than about five members enter a vortex of decline because they are too small to simultaneously hunt, defend kills, and babysit. Thus, the African wild dogs are even more threatened than their population of 5,000 might suggest, this being equivalent to no more than 700 viable packs across the continent.

Domestication

Various origins have been proposed for domestic dogs, and doubtless many different canids have been partly domesticated at one time or another. Even so, the wolf is generally accepted as the most likely ancestor of today’s domestic dogs. Domestic dogs are thus known to science as a subspecies of wolf – Canis lupus familiaris. The earliest known archaeological indication of domestication comes from a single canine jawbone unearthed at a site in Germany. More foreshortened than that of a wolf, with the teeth more closely packed together, this find is thought to be around 14,000 years old. Other early remains of what are believed to be domestic dogs include a specimen from Coon in Iran, which dates back over 11,000 years. These various discoveries demonstrate that the wolf entered into domestic partnership with man before any other animal species and before the cultivation of plants for food. Indeed, recent molecular evidence suggests that dogs may even have been domesticated as much as 100,000 years ago.

The precise circumstances of domestication have been the subject of considerable speculation. Various theories have been advanced that center on our ancestors’ deliberate use of wolves for practical purposes: hunting, guarding, tidying carrion and refuse around settlements, or even as food items. However, it is equally likely that domestication simply came about by accident, with hunter–gatherer societies capturing and raising young wild animals as pets.

Adapted from the entry on the ‘Dog Family’ in The Encyclopedia of Mammals edited by David MacDonald, also available online as part of Oxford Reference. Copyright © Brown Bear Books 2013. David MacDonald is Founder and Director of Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit.

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By Andrew T. Guzman

A few days ago, the President of the United States used the State of the Union address to call for action on climate change. The easy way to do so would have been to call on Congress to take action. Had President Obama framed his remarks in this way, he would have given a nod to those concerned about climate change, but nothing would happen because there is virtually no chance of Congressional action. What he actually did, however, was to put some of his own political capital on the line by promising executive action if Congress fails to address the issue. The President, assuming he meant what he said, has apparently accepted the need for a strong policy response to this threat.

Not everybody agrees. There has long been a political debate on the subject of climate change, even though the scientific debate has been settled for years. In recent months, perhaps in response to Hurricane Sandy, the national drought of 2012, and the fact that 2012 was the hottest year in the history of the United States, there seems to have been a shift in the political winds.

In 1969, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described the “five stages” of acceptance:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For many years, climate change discussions seemed to be about getting our politics past the “denial” stage. Over time, however, scientific inquiry made it obvious that climate change is happening and that it is the result of human activity. With more than 97% of climate scientists and every major scientific body of relevance in the United States in agreement that the threat is real, not to mention a similar consensus internationally, it became untenable to simply refuse to accept the reality of climate change.

The next stage was anger. Unable to stand on unvarnished denials, skeptics lashed out, alleging conspiracies and secret plots to propagate the myth of climate change. In 2003, Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma said, “Could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.” In 2009 we had “climategate.” More than a thousand private emails between climate scientists were stolen and used in an attempt (later debunked) to show a conspiracy to fool the world.

Now, from the right, come signs of a move to bargaining. On 13 February, Senator Marco Rubio reacted to the President’s call for action on climate change, but he did not do so by denying the phenomenon itself or accusing the President of having being duped by a grand hoax.  He stated instead, “The government can’t change the weather. There are other countries that are polluting in the atmosphere much greater than we are at this point. They are not going to stop.” Earlier this month he made even more promising statements: “There has to be a cost-benefit analysis [applied] to every one of these principles.” This is not anger or denial. This is bargaining. As long as others are not doing enough, he suggests, we get to ignore the problem.

It is, apparently, no longer credible for a presidential hopeful like Senator Rubio to deny the very existence of the problem. His response, instead, invites a discussion about what can be done. What if we could get the key players: Europe, China, India, the United States, and Russia to the table and find a way for all of them to lower their emissions? If the voices of restraint are concerned that our efforts will not be fruitful, we can talk about what kinds of actions can improve the climate.

To be fair, Senator Rubio has not totally abandoned denials. While engaging in what I have called “bargaining” above, he also threw in, almost in passing, “I know people said there’s a significant scientific consensus on that issue, but I’ve actually seen reasonable debate on that principle.” In December he declared himself “not qualified” to opine on whether climate change is real. These are denials, but they are issued without any passion; his heart is not in it. They seem more like pro forma statements, perhaps to satisfy those who have not yet made the step from denial and anger to bargaining.

If leaders on the right have reached the bargaining stage, the next stage is depression. What will that look like? One possibility is a full embrace of the science of climate change coupled with a fatalistic refusal to act. “It is too late, the planet is already cooked and nothing we can do will matter.”  When you start hearing these statements from those who oppose action, take heart; we will be close to where we need to get politically. Though it will be tempting to point out that past inaction was caused by the earlier stages of denial, anger, and bargaining, nothing will be gained by such recriminations. The path forward requires continuing to make the case not only for the existence of climate change, but also for strategies to combat it.

The final stage, of course, is acceptance. At that point, the country will be prepared to do something serious about climate change. At that point we can have a serious national (and international) conversation about how to respond. Climate change will affect us all, and we need to get to acceptance as soon as possible. In short, climate change will tear at the very fabric of our society. It will compromise our food production and distribution, our water supply, our transportation systems, our health care systems, and much more. The longer we wait to act, the more difficult it will be to do so.  All of this means that movement away from simple denial to something closer to acceptance is encouraging.  The sooner we get there, the better.

Andrew T. Guzman is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International and Executive Education at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change and How International Law Works, among others.

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By Alfred Rolington

Cyber attacks on Iran have been well publicised in the press and on Western television. General William Shelton, a top American cyber general, has now turned these attacks around saying that these events are giving Iran a strategic and tactical cyber advantage creating a very serious “force to be reckoned with.”

Since 2010, Iran’s infrastructure has been attacked hundreds of times by cyber viruses. To date the most documented and best known cyber attacks have been aimed at Iran and are known as cyber worms called Stuxnet. These electronic worms were used to attack Iranian nuclear power plants and connected systems. General Shelton, who heads up Air Force Space Command and Air Force cyber operations, gave a briefing to reporters in January 2013, where he said that the 2010 Stuxnet virus attack on Iran’s Natanz uranium processing plant had generated considered responses from Iran that have led to improved offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities.

In December 2012, the Stuxnet virus returned and hit computer and energy operations and companies in the southern Hormozgan region. Shelton claimed that Iran’s improved cyber defense capability had helped Iran protect it against subsequent attacks on oil terminals and other manufacturing plants. This new capability, he believed, will subsequently be used by Iran against its enemies in the near future. “They are going to be a force to be reckoned with,” said General Shelton, “with the potential capabilities that they will develop over the years.” At present he stated that America had over six thousand cyber specialists employed to monitor, analyse and counter cyber attacks, and he was intending to employ another thousand specialists over the next twelve months to improve America’s effectiveness in this vital area.

Moreover, assassinations and assassination attempts in conjunction with cyber attacks are thought to be part of an integrated plan of attacks on Iran’s nuclear research and manufacturing capabilities. A year ago on 11 January 2012, Ahmadi Roshan, a 32-year-old Iranian scientist, and his driver were both killed when a motorcyclist attached a bomb to their car as they were driving. So far these attacks, which seem to form part of the broader cyber-related strategy aimed at Iran’s nuclear program, have successfully killed five Iranian nuclear scientists in the last two years according to FARS, a Tehran news agency. However, in January 2013, the Iranian Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi claimed that his organisation had stopped a number of attempts to kill nuclear scientists so it is uncertain which reports are accurate.

These attacks on Iran’s electronic systems represent only a very small amount of the current cyber attack and threat capability. Increasingly, all governments and corporations must respond to the cyber reality. With an interconnected world, cyber attacks on infrastructure have become frequent and damaging. Cyber crime is costing businesses billions of pounds although they tend to keep quiet about the attacks. (The BBC reported that UK cyber crime costs £27bn a year.) Efforts to get a grip on the problem had been hampered by firms who don’t want to admit they had been the victims of attacks for fear of “reputational damage”. Baroness Neville-Jones, Prime Minister David Cameron, and Foreign Secretary William Hague met the bosses of some of Britain’s biggest businesses, including Barclays, HSBC, Tesco and BA, to urge them to take the problem more seriously.

In September 2012, a hacker called vorVzakone posted a message on a Russian online forum saying that a malevolent Trojan, called Project Blitzkrieg, was capable of attacking the American financial industry, that it had already critically affected up to five hundred American targets, and that it had stolen over five million dollars. “This attack combines both a technical, innovative backend with the tactics of a successful, organized cybercrime movement,” a McAfee report explained, adding that the next target would probably be investment banks.

Hackers, apparently working independently as criminal gangs, have grown in their specialization faster than most police and government intelligence organisations would have believed possible. Yet cyber hackers working for governments have targeted everything from computer systems to power plants from the US to Iran, Europe to China, Australia and beyond. These civil servant hackers are often employed by governments to help fulfill a strategy, to change information and publicity, or to gain information and bring systems down.

One example comes from Ray Boisvert, who recently retired from the post of Assistant Director of Intelligence for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. He believes the current capabilities of most governments is not enough to counter the current cyber threats. He said that cyber threats were fundamentally undermining Canada’s “future prosperity as a nation.” He stated there is a lack of response on three levels. First from government and corporate policy-makers who do not, in his opinion, understand the technical complexities of digital telecommunications security. Second the government has not invested enough to protect Canada’s communications and electricity systems from cyber attacks. Third, he thought there was an inherent corporate shortsightedness regarding protecting Canada’s communications infrastructure.

The cyber issue is growing and will become a rising threat to governments and corporations. It may require a serious attack such as a massive electricity system shut down before a full government response is played out.

Alfred Rolington is the author of Strategic Intelligence for the 21st Century: The Mosaic Method, an industry insider’s assessment of current intelligence methods and offers a new strategic model, directed toward the police, military, and intelligence agencies. He was formerly CEO of Jane’s Information Group, responsible for such publications as Jane’s Defense Review and Jane’s Police Review, as well as CEO for Oxford Analytica. He has over thirty years’ experience of analytical publishing and media companies, producing information and intelligence for commerce, law enforcement, the, military and government. He has written about and given lectures on intelligence and strategic planning to Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard Universities, and to organisations such as Thomson Reuters, the CIA, SIS (MI6), NATO Headquarters, and GCHQ.

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Image credits: Information Systems Technician 2nd Class Ryan Allshouse uses the intrusion detection system to monitor unclassified network activity from the automated data processing workspace. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons;  Maps and charts are scanned from “Atlas of the Middle East”, published in January 1993 by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman

Students are often told — perhaps by excited friends or nostalgic parents — that university is the best time of their life. Well, for some people these years may live up to their billing. For many others, however, things aren’t so straightforward. College can prove more of a trial than a pleasure.

In truth it’s hardly surprising that many students struggle with university life. For one thing, it’s probably the first time they’ve lived away from home. College involves all sorts of potentially daunting changes and challenges with the young person’s support network of family and friends usually many miles away.

It isn’t only university life that students may be struggling with. Many common psychological problems also tend to develop around this stage of life. Depression, phobias, social anxiety, panic disorder, insomnia, alcohol problems, eating disorders, sexual problems — all typically begin during adolescence or early adulthood.

Whether students arrive at university with these problems, or develop them while there, coping with mental health issues alone and in a strange town can be particularly difficult. It’s not made any easier by the assumption that you should be having a ball.

When we think about mental health, one issue that is often overlooked is gender. Yet who is more likely to develop almost all of the psychological problems we’ve mentioned? The answer is clear: women.

Indeed, although it’s commonly asserted that rates of psychological disorder are virtually identical for men and women, when one takes a careful look at the most reliable epidemiological data a very different picture emerges.

Contrary to received wisdom, overall rates of psychological disorder are not the same for both sexes. In fact, they are around 20-40% higher in women than in men. Depression, for example, affects approximately twice as many women as men. The same is true for anxiety disorders. Women are anywhere from three to ten times more likely to develop eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa. There’s good evidence to suggest that women are more vulnerable to both sleep disorders (primarily insomnia) and sexual problems (such as loss of desire, arousal problems, and pain during sex — all of which are classified as psychological issues).

This doesn’t mean, of course, that mental illness is an exclusively female problem — far from it. Very large numbers of men experience depression and anxiety, for example.

Nevertheless, though men tend to be prone to so-called externalizing disorders such as alcohol and drug problems and anti-social personality disorder, while women are more susceptible to emotional problems like depression and anxiety, the figures aren’t equal. If the epidemiological data is reliable, women clearly outnumber men for psychological disorders as a whole.

How do we explain this phenomenon? Why is it that women appear to be more vulnerable to mental illness than men? Well, this is an under-researched area. In the case of certain disorders — depression, most notably — some useful work has been done on gender. For most conditions, however, we have little evidence for why men and women are affected differently.

Things are especially tricky because mental illness is seldom the result of just one factor: a complex mix of genetic, biological, psychological, and social causes is often involved. Yet patterns do emerge from the limited research that has been conducted into the links between gender and mental health. What stands out is the stress caused by life events and social roles.

It’s certainly plausible that women experience higher levels of stress because of the demands of their social role. Increasingly, women are expected to function as career woman, homemaker, and breadwinner — all while being perfectly shaped and impeccably dressed: “superwoman” indeed. Given that domestic work is undervalued, and considering that women tend to be paid less, find it harder to advance in a career, have to juggle multiple roles, and are bombarded with images of apparent female “perfection”, it would be surprising if there weren’t some emotional cost. Women are also much more likely to have experienced childhood sexual abuse, a trauma that all too often results in lasting damage.

How do these environmental factors affect the individual? At a psychological level, the evidence suggests that they can undermine women’s self-concept — that is, the way a person thinks about themselves. These are the kind of pressures that can leave women feeling as if they’ve somehow failed; as if they don’t have what it takes to be successful; as if they’ve been left behind. Body image worries may be especially damaging. Then there’s the fact that women are taught to place such importance on social relationships. Such relationships can be a fantastic source of strength, of course. But to some extent we’re relying on other people for our happiness: a risky business. If things don’t work out, our self-concept can take a knock.

Perhaps then, part of the reason why so many common psychological disorders begin in adolescence and early adulthood is because this is the time when young people start to take on the demands of their conventional adult role. If those demands are more stressful for women than men that may help explain why we see young women start to outnumber young men when it comes to psychological problems.

But we need more evidence. The best answers will come from longitudinal studies: following representative cohorts over a number of years from childhood into adulthood, and carefully measuring the interaction between biological factors, life events, and mental illness.

Such research is complex and expensive, but given the extent of the burden on society and individuals alike, understanding what causes mental illness and thus being better placed to prevent and treat it should need no justification. Yet we cannot assume, as so many have done, that gender is merely a marginal issue in mental health. In fact, it may often be a crucial element of the puzzle.

Daniel Freeman is Professor of Clinical Psychology and MRC Senior Clinical Fellow, Oxford University. Jason Freeman is a freelance writer and editor. Together they wrote The Stressed Sex: Uncovering the Truth About Men, Women, and Mental Health, Anxiety: A Very Short Introduction, and Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear.

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Image Credits: (1) Stressed student. Photo by Alexeys, iStockphoto. (2) Hard study. Photo by Oliver, iStockphoto.

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By Chandra Ford

The seventh of February will mark the thirteenth National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Despite the fact that blacks make up only 14% of the US population, the CDC reports that blacks accounted for 44% of all newly reported HIV infections in 2009, the HIV infection rate among Latinos was nearly three times as high as that of whites, and 1 in 4 persons living with HIV/AIDS in the USA is an older adult (50+ years old).

The CDC reported that 1,600 White, 450 Black, and 300 Latino men aged 50 or older acquired HIV in 2009 through unprotected sex with other men. In other research conducted among senior-housing residents, investigators learned that 42% of residents had been sexually active within the previous six months. One third of the sexually active residents reported two or more partners during that period, but only 20% had regularly used condoms.

Alarmingly, older adults are prone to be disproportionately diagnosed in the late stages of HIV disease. Many older Americans who seek services in public health venues do not undergo testing for HIV infection, some due to mistrust in the government. Researchers in a recent study found among the 226 participants, 30% reported belief in AIDS conspiracy theories, 72% reported government mistrust, and 45% reported not undergoing HIV testing within the past 12 months.

Among African Americans, endorsements of AIDS conspiracy theories stem from historical experiences with racism and medical discrimination, although knowledge of African Americans’ experiences may lead members of other racial/ethnic groups to endorse such theories.

Making HIV testing routine in public health venues may be an efficient way to improve early diagnosis among at-risk older adults. Alternative possibilities include expanding HIV testing in nonpublic health venues. Finally, identifying particular sources of misinformation and mistrust would appear useful for appropriate targeting of HIV testing strategies in the future.

Key calendar dates:
7 February 2013               National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
19 May 2013                       Asian Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
27 June 2013                     National HIV Testing Day
15 October 2013               National Latino HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
1 December 2013              World AIDS Day

For further reading:

• AIDS.gov
• CDC on HIV/AIDS
• “Belief in AIDS-Related Conspiracy Theories and Mistrust in the Government” by Chandra L. Ford et al. in The Gerontologist

Dr. Chandra Ford is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at UCLA. Her areas of expertise are in the social determinants of HIV/AIDS disparities, the health of sexual minority populations and Critical Race Theory. Ford has received several competitive awards, including the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Services Award (an individual dissertation grant) from the National Institutes of Health and a North Carolina Impact Award for her research contributions to North Carolinians. Her most recent research, “Belief in AIDS-Related Conspiracy Theories and Mistrust in the Government” in The Gerontologist, is available to read for free for a limited time.

The Gerontologist, published since 1961, is a bimonthly journal (first issue in February) of The Gerontological Society of America that provides a multidisciplinary perspective on human aging through the publication of research and analysis in gerontology, including social policy, program development, and service delivery. It reflects and informs the broad community of disciplines and professions involved in understanding the aging process and providing service to older people.

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By Richard Susskind

The uncharitable might say that I write the same book every four years or so. Some critics certainly accuse me of having said the same thing for many years. I don’t disagree. Since the early 80s, my enduring interest has been in the ways in which technology can modernize and improve the work of the legal profession and the courts. My main underpinning conviction has indeed not changed: that legal work is document and information intensive, and that a whole host of information technologies can and should streamline and sometimes even overhaul traditional methods of practicing law and administering justice.

What have changed, of course, are the enabling technologies. When I started out on what has become a career devoted largely to legal technology, the web had not been invented, nor had tablets, handheld devices, mobile phones, and much else. As new technologies emerge, therefore, I always have a new story to tell and more evidence that suggests the legal world is shifting from being a cottage industry to an IT-enabled information sector.

The evolution of my thinking reflects my own technical interests and career activities over the years. My first work in the field, in the 1980s, focused on artificial intelligence and its potential and limitations in the law. This began in earnest with my doctoral research at Oxford University. I was interested in the possibility of developing computer systems that could solve legal problems and offer legal advice. Many specialists at the time wanted to define expert systems in law in architectural terms (by reference to what underlying technologies were being used, from rule-based systems to neural networks). I took a more pragmatic view and described these systems functionally as computer applications that sought to make scarce legal knowledge and expertise more widely available and easily accessible.

This remains my fundamental aspiration today. I believe there is enormous scope for using technology, especially Internet technology, as a way of providing affordable, practical legal guidance to non-lawyers, especially those who are not able to pay for conventional legal service. These systems may not be expert systems, architecturally-defined. Instead, they are web-based resources (such as online advisory and document drafting systems) and are delivering legal help, on-screen, as envisaged back in the 1980s.

During the first half of the 90s, while I was working in a law firm (Masons, now Pinsent Masons), my work became less academic. I was bowled over by the web and began to form a view of the way it would revolutionize the communication habits of practicing lawyers and transform the information seeking practices of the legal fraternity. I also had some rudimentary ideas about online communities of lawyers and clients; we now call these social networks. My thinking came together in the mid-1990s. I became clear, in my own mind at least, that information technology would definitely challenge and change the world of law. Most people thought I was nuts.

A few years later, to help put my ideas into practice, I developed what I called ‘the grid’ – a simple model that explained the inter-relationships of legal data, legal information, legal knowledge, as found within law firms and shared with clients. I had used this model quite a bit with my clients (by this time, I was working independently) and it seemed to help lawyers think through what they should be doing about IT.

In the years that followed, however, I became even more confident that the Internet was destined to change the legal sector not incrementally and peripherally but radically, pervasively, and irreversibly. But I felt that, in the early 2000s, most lawyers were complacent. Times were good, business was brisk, and the majority of practitioners could not really imagine that legal practice and the court system would be thrown into upheaval by disruptive technologies.

Then came the global recession and, in turn, lawyers became more receptive than they had been in boom times when there had been no obvious reason why they might change course. Dreadful economic conditions convinced lawyers that tomorrow would look little like yesterday.

With many senior lawyers now recognizing that we are on the brink of major change, my current preoccupation is that most law schools around the world are ignoring this future. They continue to teach law much as I was taught in the late 1970s. They are equipping tomorrow’s lawyers to be twentieth century not twenty-first century lawyers. My mission now is to help law teachers to prepare the next generation of lawyers for the new legal world.

Richard Susskind OBE is an author, speaker, and independent adviser to international professional firms and national governments. He is president of the Society for Computers and law IT adviser to the lord chief justice. Tomorrow’s Lawyers is his eighth book.

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By Lauren Pecorino

There is a tendency to complain about policies when writing blogs, but I think it is time to commend the British campaigns and innovations in treatment. They have proven to be some of the best in the world and have had a major impact in the fight against cancer.

One of the best British campaigns is against cervical cancer. Getting personally posted invitations to attend your next PAP screening, supported by pamphlets of information, is something few women ignore. Those who try to ignore these invitations are rightly and relentlessly bombarded with regular reminders.

And, with the knowledge that a sexually transmitted virus, Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), is responsible for all cases of cervical cancer, the UK implemented a national school-based HPV vaccination programme that has proven to yield high uptake. By 2009, 70 percent of 12-13 year olds in the UK were fully vaccinated. These results are admirable compared to the results of alternative on-demand provisions offered by other countries including the USA. Note that the vaccine is recommended for early teens as it is a preventative vaccine and not a therapeutic vaccine, and must be administered before the initiation of sexual activity for it to be effective. The vaccine prevents about 70% of cervical cancers caused by two specific strains of HPV. PAP screening is still important to catch cases that are not prevented by the vaccine. An added bonus of this campaign is that the same vaccine also protects against some head, neck, and anal cancers caused by HPV infections.

Another great British effort is towards the prevention of lung cancer. The anti-smoking adverts have been haunting, especially the most recent one released by the UK Department of Health that shows a tumor growing on a cigarette. It is brilliant. I wish I had designed it. The advert strikingly conveys the message that if you saw the damage smoking causes, you would not smoke. The percentage of male cigarette smokers have fallen from 55% in 1970 to 21% in 2010 and a decreasing number of deaths due to lung cancer has followed this trend.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The UK is also a model of good practice in that it is the only country in the world which has a network of free ‘stop-smoking’ services, recently supported by specialized training for National Health Service Stop Smoking practitioners.

We can help the national campaign at a personal level by being more opinionated and outspoken when it comes to letting those around us know that smoking is harmful and “uncool”- especially among the young. We must ensure the message is passed down to new generations.

Finally, the UK is at the leading edge in using stem cells to help replace organs damaged by cancer. Tracheal transplants using tracheal scaffolds from cadavers seeded with the patient’s own stem cells have been used to replace damaged tissue for patients with tracheal cancer. Currently scientists at University College London are developing very similar procedures to grow a new nose for a patient who had lost their nose to cancer. These innovative approaches are the result of a continuously open, well-supported but regulated stem cell research policy, not yet seen in the USA.

Well done Great Britain!

Lauren Pecorino received her PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in Cell and Developmental Biology. She crossed the Atlantic to carry out a postdoctoral tenure at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, London. She is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Greenwich where teaches Cancer Biology and Therapeutics. The teaching of this course motivated her to write The Molecular Biology of Cancer: Mechanisms, Targets, and Therapeutics, now in its second edition. Feedback on the textbook posted on Amazon from a cancer patient drove her to write a book on cancer for a wider audience: Why Millions Survive Cancer: the Successes of Science.

Read a World Cancer Day Q&A with Lauren Pecorino.
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By Thomas P. Beresford, M.D.

Psychological treatment studies that did not measure the maturity of psychological adaptive mechanisms in cancer patients have reported conflicting cancer survival results. Widely publicized studies noted increased survival rates among cancer patients who underwent psychotherapeutic treatment. However, more recent multicenter study could not replicate improved survival after behavioral treatment, and other studies have reported similarly conflicting results. Since published reports suggest that patients likely to benefit from psychotherapies are generally those with the most psychological maturity, it seems possible that the underlying health of psychological adaptive mechanisms may be related to cancer survival.

To our knowledge, prior to our 2006 report, psychological adaptive mechanism maturity had not been considered as affecting cancer survival either in behavioral-treatment studies or in trials of antidepressants. In that report we used measures of both depression symptom frequency and psychological adaptive mechanism maturity to assess what, if any, relationship each bore on survival probability in cancer patients. On the basis of previous studies of depression and ego-adaptation, we believed that “Immature” adaptive styles and frequent depression symptoms would independently predict lower survival rates. Then we studied 86 consecutive, mostly late-stage, cancer outpatients for up to 5 years; their survival data were analyzed in relation to the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ) scores at study entry. Cumulative survival probability curves contrasted the extreme cases: the most (N = 15) to the least (N = 21) depressed, and the “immature” (N = 14) to the “mature” (N = 16) adaptors. Depression did not separate the groups until 30 months after diagnosis. (Figure 1) 

Psychological adaptive mechanism (ego defense) style separated them at 8 months; by 18 months, the Immature survival probability had dropped to 50%, versus 87% for the Mature. At 36 months, survival probabilities were 19% and 57%, respectively. This study suggested further clinical attention toward psychological adaptive mechanism maturity and immaturity as a potentially strong indicator of distress and lowered survival in cancer patients. It also indicated that the maturity of adaptive mechanisms must be taken into account in both medicinal and behavioral treatment trials of cancer patients since underlying difficulty may be more related to poor adaptation rather than traditional psychopathological constructs like depression.

While human psychological adaptation has been studied in various forms, including such terms as coping or ego defense mechanisms, this concept has yet to reach clinical use owing largely to the absence of a replicable clinical format that can allow reliable recognition of psychological adaptive mechanisms in the clinical, one-on-one setting. The Principal Investigator (PI) has developed a decision tree recognition algorithm for the purpose of assessing individual adaptive behaviors in the diagnostic and treatment settings. (Figure 2)

While previous methods, such as the DSQ, offer a relative convenience, they are crude measures of these complex phenomena and can only be used in studies that compare groups of individuals in contrast to each other. The recognition algorithm approach aims at a specific assessment of respective individuals in a here-and-now setting. This approach can be used both in clinical assessment and treatment as well as in research studies that seek to characterize groups of patients, such as those presenting with use of Immature adaptive mechanisms who present with much lower likelihoods of cancer survival.

Other research indicates that psychological adaptive mechanisms occur naturally in graded steps that reflect increasing brain development from birth through early adulthood. Conversely, however, complex behaviors of this kind that utilize many brain tracts, including frontal lobe functions, may theoretically be lost when brain function decreases or when stress is overwhelming, as may be the case of the stress of cancer illness in the setting of the less flexible mechanisms. Neurodegenerative changes following radiation treatment of neoplasms in the brain, for example, may result in impaired functioning modulated by the fronto-subcortical tracts, including judgment, motivation, and executive planning functions.  Alternatively, overwhelming stress reactions can result in lowered adaptive mechanism maturity, such as that seen in some cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Much remains to be learned in the interaction between humans and the illnesses that they encounter; the psychological adaptation model offers one new approach to both clinical and empirical understanding.

Dr. Thomas P. Beresford is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the author of Psychological Adaptive Mechanisms: Ego Defense Recognition in Practice and Research. Trained in psychiatry at The Cambridge Hospital/Harvard Medical School, he has focused his clinical and scientific career on the psychiatric problems that medical and surgical patients encounter, whether in adjusting to illness or in returning to normal brain functioning.

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By Mark Peters

Twitter is a joke factory, where professional comics and civilian jesters crank out one-liners round the clock.

In that joke factory, there are popular models. Every day, new jokes play on phrases such as “Dance like no one is watching,” “Sex is like pizza,” and “When life hands you lemons.” While the repetition can be maddening, I’m impressed by how, inevitably, there’s always another good joke lurking in even the most tired formula. “Give a man a fish” variations are endless, but there’s always a fresh catch, like this tweet by Erikka Innes:

Some formulas are seasonal. The arrival of 2013 brings variations of a formula I presume originated as a simple observation: “It’s X year, but I’m still writing X-1 year on my checks.” Some use the snowclone-like formula to point out its own exhaustion:

People write these kind of tweets about every joke formula, so I’d say pointing out hackiness has become its own form of hackery. Another option is using this format to comment on how checks have mostly gone the way of dinosaurs. This was a popular theme this year:

When jokesters move beyond the world of checks by replacing the word check, the humor gets more humorous:

Others keep the check part and replace 2012. In some cases, the subject matter stays close to the world of money, usually implying the tweeter is broke or a deadbeat:

Sometimes 2012 gets replaced with something a lot more creative:

A double replacement adds more possibilities:

And there’s plenty of room for absurd silliness, intriguing questions, and wordplay galore:

Love it or loathe it, this joke format will likely survive as long as we have years. Even in 3013, I bet we’ll still be writing “Please have sex with me” into the programming of our robots.

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, and language columnist for Visual Thesaurus. He also writes Lost Batman Tales. Read his previous OUPblog posts.

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By Anthony Scioli, Ph.D.

“Just look at the gladiators… and consider the blows they endure! Consider how they who have been well-disciplined prefer to accept a blow than ignominiously avoid it! How often it is made clear that they consider nothing other than the satisfaction of their [coach] or the [fans]! Even when they are covered with wounds they send a messenger to their [coach] to inquire his will. If they have given satisfaction to their [coach], they are pleased to fall. What even mediocre gladiator ever groans; ever alters the expression on his face? Which one of them acts shamefully, either standing or falling? And which of them, even when he does succumb, ever contracts his neck when ordered to receive the blow?”

The above passage, with the exception of two minor word substitutions on my part, was written by Cicero 2,000 years ago. My point is that his description of the sacrificial gladiator of the ancient amphitheater can be applied all too easily to the players who currently do battle on the modern gridiron.

I am convinced that football, in its present form, cannot last. I will put aside the physical carnage that piles up every weekend, the torn cartilage, broken bones, blackened, bruised and ripped skin, the shredded muscle fibers; I am not a physician. However, I am a psychologist. From my perspective, I believe that the greatest health crisis precipitated by football involves the brain and the mind, especially for those at the professional level, and particularly for those who are retired, and have suffered one too many concussions. For these former gladiators, there is a great risk of succumbing to severe, life-threatening forms of hopelessness.

The hopelessness that descends upon the retired professional football player should not be a surprise. It is understandable if you begin with some knowledge of what changes occur in a soft and mushy brain that has been repeatedly concussed, or more bluntly, tossed and smashed from side to side within a bony skull-box. Repetitive brain trauma can result in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)

CTE has been detected in the brains of ex-football players well as former boxers. In CTE, there are signs of a spreading tau protein that normally serves a stabilizing function but becomes dislodged, primarily from the axons which transmit nerve impulses. The floating Tau form a spreading tangle of tissue that disrupts brain function. Rare diseases can precipitate this pathological cascade but so can repetitive head trauma. CTE has also been found in the aged, and those stricken with Alzheimer’s disease. The most commonly affected areas include the frontal lobes (decision-making, planning, willpower), the temporal lobes (memory and speech), and the parietal area (sensory integration, reading and writing). The most common emotional symptoms in those suffering from CTE include depression, anger, hyper-aggressiveness, irritability, diminished insight and poor judgment.

On 2 May 2012 former football star Junior Seau shot himself in the chest with a .357 magnum. Eighteen months earlier, Seau had driven his SUV off a cliff following an arrest on charges of domestic violence. He claimed that he had fallen asleep. Back then, many in his circle of friends and family hoped and prayed it was the truth. His brain was sent to a team of researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine. Their tests revealed a brain besieged by CTE.

A little more than a year earlier, in February, 2011, Dave Duerson, also a former professional football player, similarly committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. He had texted a message to his family indicating that he was “saving” his brain for research. Three months later BU School of Medicine confirmed “neurodegenerative disease linked to concussions.” In high school, Duerson had been a member of the National Honor Society and played the sousaphone, traveling Europe with the Musical Ambassadors All-American Band. He attended the University of Notre Dame on both football and baseball scholarships. He graduated with honors, receiving a BA in Economics. Duerson played eleven seasons in the NFL.

Whenever interviewed, the researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine are reluctant to affirm a cause and effect link between CTE and suicide. They provide the typical (and not unreasonable) response that multiple causes often underlie human behavior, including suicide. While generally true, a case such as that of Duerson seems to beg the question, what else besides CTE could have led a formerly intelligent, well-organized, responsible, and successful individual to morph into a desperate failure that ends his own life at the age of fifty?

Anthony Scioli is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Keene State College. He is the co-author of Hope in the Age of Anxiety with Henry Biller. Dr. Scioli completed Harvard fellowships in human motivation and behavioral medicine. He co-authored the chapter on emotion for the Encyclopedia of Mental Health and currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Positive Psychology and the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Read his previous blog articles.

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By Arthur P. Shimamura

This year’s academy award nominations of Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty, attest to our fascination of watching “true stories” depicted on the screen. We adopt a special set of expectations when we believe a movie is based on actual events, a sentiment the Coen Brothers parodied when they stated at the beginning of Fargo that “this is a true story,” even though it wasn’t. In the science fiction spoof, Galaxy Quest, aliens have intercepted a Star Trek-like TV show and believe the program to be a documentary of actual human warfare. As a result, they come to Earth to enlist Cmdr. Peter Quincy Taggart (Tim Allen), star of the TV show, to help fight the evil warlord Sarris (named after the film critic, Andrew Sarris), as they believe Taggart to be a true war hero rather than merely playing one on TV.

Movies that are “based on a true story” blur the boundary between documentary and make-believe. We, much like the aliens in Galaxy Quest, expect such movies to depict an authentic portrayal of actual events. The story of Argo — about a CIA agent who helps individuals escape from Iran by having them pose as a film crew — would almost have to be based on actual events, otherwise no one would buy into such a preposterous plot! Interestingly, the climatic chase scene on the airport runway is completely fictional, though I think we forgive the filmmakers for some poetic license, particularly as the scene is so exciting. We are much less forgiving in the portrayal of torture in Zero Dark Thirty, to the point where producer Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow have been reprimanded by Senators Feinstein, Levin, and McCain for suggesting that torture was effective in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Yet even documentaries distort the “truth” by slanting history through biased portrayals. Should movies “based on a true story” be viewed as completely accurate documents of history?

One psychological point is clear: our emotional involvement with a movie depends on the degree to which we expect or “appraise” the events to be real. Studies by Richard Lazarus and others have shown that physiological markers of emotion, such as skin conductance (i.e. sweaty palms), increase when subjects believe a film to depict an actual event. In one study, subjects watched a film clip depicting an industrial accident involving a power saw. Those who were told that they were watching footage of an actual accident (rather than actors re-enacting the event) exhibited heightened emotional responses. Thus, people watching the same movie may engage themselves differently depending on the degree to which they construe the events as realistic portrayals.

Even when we know we are watching a re-enactment, as with Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty, I suspect we become more emotionally attached when we believe we are witnessing actual events. We more readily empathize with characters and buy into the story. Of course, the authenticity of a movie depends not only on us having prior knowledge that a movie is based on actual events but also on how realistic the characters appear in their actions and predicaments. As wonderfully realistic and engaging as Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty were, in my opinion the most “realistic” movie among this year’s Academy Award nominees is the entirely fictitious Amour, in which the elderly Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) must care for his wife (Emmanuelle Riva), whose mental abilities are deteriorating from strokes. The superb acting and unusual editing (e.g. exceedingly long takes) amplify emotions and engage us as if we are watching a true and heart-wrenching story.

Arthur P. Shimamura is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He studies the psychological and biological underpinnings of memory and movies. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to study links between art, mind, and brain. He is co-editor of Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (Shimamura & Palmer, ed., OUP, 2012), editor of the forthcoming Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies(ed., OUP, March 2013), and author of the forthcoming book, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder (May 2013). Further musings can be found on his blog, Psychocinematics: Cognition at the Movies.

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Remembered today for her much publicized feud with Linus Pauling over the shape of proteins, known as “the cyclol controversy,” Dorothy Wrinch made essential contributions to the fields of Darwinism, probability and statistics, quantum mechanics, x-ray diffraction, and computer science. The first women to receive a doctor of science degree from Oxford University, her understanding of the science of crystals and the ever-changing notion of symmetry has been fundamental to science.

We sat down with Marjorie Senechal, author of I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science, to explore the life of this brilliant and controversial figure.

Who was Dorothy Wrinch?

Dorothy Wrinch was a British mathematician and a student of Bertrand Russell. An exuberant, exasperating personality, she knew no boundaries, academic or otherwise. She sowed fertile seeds in many fields of science — philosophy, mathematics, seismology, probability, genetics, protein chemistry, crystallography.

What is she remembered for?

Unfortunately, she’s mainly remembered for her battle with the chemist Linus Pauling. Dorothy proposed the first-ever model for protein architecture, provoking a world-class controversy in scientific circles. Linus led her opponents; few noticed that his arguments were as wrong as her model was.

Why did he attack her research and career with such ferocity?

In those days before scientific imaging, scientists imagined. Outsized personalities, fierce ambitions, and cultural misunderstandings also played a role. And gender bias: Dorothy didn’t know her place. She didn’t suffer critics gratefully, or fools gladly. On a deeper level, the fight was philosophical. Imagination and experiment, beauty and truth are entangled inseparably, then and now.

Linus won two Nobel prizes. What became of Dorothy?

Dorothy, a single mother, came to the United States with her daughter at the beginning of World War II, and eventually settled in Massachusetts; she taught at Smith College for many years and wrote scientific books and papers. But her career never recovered. I wrote this book to find out why.

Marjorie Senechal is the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science and Technology, Smith College, and Co-Editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer. She is the author of I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science.

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By Mark S. Gold, MD

Public health officials and academics identified cigarette smoking and related disease as the nation’s number one killer and foremost driver of health costs in the 1980s. At that time overeating and obesity were not major problems, yet they may soon cause more disease, deaths, and health care costs than cigarettes. Food addiction, which may explain part of the epidemic, is slowly and finally  “catching on”. It’s been controversial, with some scientists dismissing it out of hand, so like any hypothesis, it needs additional tests.

If overeating is due to food acquiring drug-like or tobacco-like brain reinforcement properties, then the current globesity and overeating-related health crisis might have lessons to learn from tobacco. For example, taxes on tobacco products have been the single most important prevention tool in reducing smoking. Based on food addiction hypothesis, higher prices might also reduce soda consumption. A review suggested that for every 10% increase in price, consumption decreases by 7.8%. An industry trade publication reported even larger reductions; as prices of carbonated soft drinks increased by 6.8%, sales dropped by 7.8%, and as Coca-Cola prices increased by 12%, sales dropped by 14.6%. It follows that a tax on sweetened beverages might help consumers switch to water or more healthful beverages. Such a switch would lead to reduced caloric intake, and less weight gain.

Changing the attitudes and behaviors of the public combined to reduce smoking and smoking-related health care costs and suffering. Changing access to cigarettes by elimination of cigarette vending machines, raising the price per pack to decrease numbers of cigarettes or packs/day smoked, crafting PSAs to reduce smoking initiation, and training medical professionals to intervene and not look the other way, all helped reduce smoking.

Age of onset and exposure can change genes, and make use and addiction more likely. We know that early exposure to tobacco via second-hand-smoke, either in utero or in early life greatly increases the risk of life-long tobacco use and addiction. In the 1990s, children’s intake of sweetened beverages surpassed that of milk. In the past decade, per capita intake of calories from sugar/HFCS-sweetened beverages has increased by nearly 30%. Beverages now account for 10–15% of the calories consumed by children and adolescents. It is likely that food addiction models can be used to explain early exposure and changes in preference becoming fixed and persistent for life.  An extra can or glass of sugar or HFCS sweetened beverage consumed per day increases the likelihood of a child’s becoming obese increases by 60%.

Our efforts to manage and treat overeating and obesity might benefit from addiction methods and experience. We could develop realistic food addiction models and test new treatments. Would animals self-administer food or food constituents, avidly, with bingeing and loss of control? Yes. Our work (and Bart Hoebel’ s before) clearly demonstrates that sucrose and fructose corn syrup are self-administered as if they were drugs and that an opiate-like abstinence syndrome could be produced by detoxification or antagonist administration. Sugar stimulates its own taking  causes craving, wanting, withdrawal, and can motivate and change our behavior.. If the food addiction hypothesis were relevant to the human condition, these animal models could be used to test new medications. New treatments developed for overeating and obesity were previously shown to be effective in addiction medicine.

These new treatments approved by the FDA include phentermine plus topiramate and bupropion plus naltrexone. Topiramate has been used with success in alcohol dependence, bupropion in nicotine dependence, and naltrexone in opiate and also alcohol dependence. While early, these treatments are important tests of the addiction hypothesis and harbingers of more progress in the future. With addiction medicine and food addiction model systems, we may develop treatments which change food preference and not just appetite.

Food addiction may explain some, but certainly not all obesity. The Yale Food Addiction Scale may be used to screen patients for addiction-like pharmacological and psychological interventions. Medically-assisted smoking cessation efforts were enhanced once treatment advanced from simple nicotine replacement or detoxification, to the brain and the neurobehavioral attachment to cigarettes. With an addiction hypothesis that included dopamine, we discovered the efficacy of bupropion and then Chantix. Thus, rather than a successful short term treatment rate of less than 20%, we routinely helped 30% of smokers. Still, addiction-inspired public health measures rather than medically-assisted treatment were responsible for most of the successful cessation efforts, early intervention, and prevention.

Smoking-related disease caused 400,000 deaths per year in the USA plus an additional 40,000 deaths due to second-hand smoke. Until recently little effort was directed at preventing smoking or treating smokers, although we treated the lung cancers, stroke, erectile dysfunction and other diseases caused by smoking. With all this progress, all of the health savings related to smoking cessation will soon be replaced by obesity-related costs. Are these two events related? As smoking and addiction is associated with decreases in eating and weight, a nation detoxifying from smoking addiction should be expected to become overweight. Until recently, with the scientific support provided by food and addiction models, we have not applied the same lessons learned from tobacco to overeating and obesity.

Proposals for food taxes have been made and calculations formulated of revenue-benefits based on our experiences with tobacco taxation. Even when these fail, the public and health experts have to think through the idea that fruits and vegetables are more costly than fatty, sweet, fast foods. Using taxes on ingredients such as added sugar and fructose corn syrup would decrease exposure according to addiction models. This might make Coca-Cola and other sodas return to sucrose as in Mexican or Kosher Coke. Reducing portion size, while supported by cigarette experience with numbers of cigarettes per pack and purchase limits, is a weaker intervention than other approaches. Now we see food labels and calorie postings. This educates everyone as they consider is it worth the calories and do they have the time and energy to exercise away the calories ingested. Exercise is important, and promotes health, but is not a stand-alone obesity treatment or management strategy. Stigmatizing the overweight with added health premiums and workplace incentives has not worked well in the past. Blaming the patient, creating shame and guilt, doesn’t do much to inspire treatment efficacy.

Obesity has changed the width of the seats in airplanes, dress, and trouser sizes. It has also made high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugars, knee and joint pain, and other obesity-related problems routine in medical practice and treatment. Over the past three decades, rates of obesity have increased in the United States and elsewhere, so that now more people are obese and in need of treatment than ever. New approaches, evidence-based approaches, like those that have been used successfully to develop novel public health and treatment approaches for tobacco, alcohol, and other addictions are needed.

Mark S. Gold, MD is the co-editor of Food and Addiction: A Comprehensive Handbook with Kelly D. Brownell. He is the Donald Dizney Eminent Scholar, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Florida. Dr Gold is a teacher of the year, researcher and inventor who has focused for much of his career on the development of models for understanding the effects of tobacco, cocaine, opiates, other drugs, and also food, on the brain and behavior. He began his work on the relationship between food and drug addictions while at Yale working with addicts in withdrawal. He has worked for 30+ years trying to understand how to change food preferences, make eating and drugs of abuse less interesting or reinforcing at the brain’s dopamine and other reinforcement sites. Kelly D. Brownell, PhD is professor of psychology, epidemiology, and public health at Yale University and is director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. Dr. Brownell does work at the intersection of science and public policy. The Rudd Center assesses, critiques and strives to improve practices and policies related to nutrition and obesity so as to inform the public and to maximize the impact on public health.

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Image credits: (1) Young mother and her baby, sleeping in bed. Photo by SvetlanaFedoseeva, iStockphoto. (2) Shrimp cocktail elegantly served in a martini glass accompanied by a glass of white wine. Photo by sbossert, iStockphoto.

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By Arthur P. Shimamura

Is it the sense of experiencing reality that makes movies so compelling? Technological advances in film, such as sound, color, widescreen, 3-D, and now high frame rate (HFR), have offered ever increasing semblances of realism on the screen. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, we are introduced to the world of 48 frames per second (fps), which presents much sharper moving images than what we’ve seen in movies produced at the standard 24 fps. Yet many viewers, including myself, have come away with a less-than-satisfying experience as the sharp rendering of the characters portrayed is reminiscent of either old videotaped TV programs (soap operas, BBC productions) or recent CGI video games. What features of HFR create this new sensory experience and why does it appear so unsettlingly similar to the experience of watching a low budget TV program?

One factor that can be ruled out is the potential difference in flicker rate. Moving images are of course created by the rapid succession of still frames, and thus the flicker or on-and-off rate must be fast enough so that we do not perceive any change in illumination between frames. With early silent films, the flicker rate was less than 16 fps, and a noticeable flashing or flickering was apparent (hence the term “flicks” to refer to these early movies). Since the advent of sound, the standard has been 24 fps, though the flicker rate is increased with the use of a propeller-like shutter that spins rapidly in a movie projector so that a movie running at 24 fps actually presents each frame two or three times, thereby increasing the flicker rate to 48 or 72 fps. Thus, with respect to flicker rate we have always watched movies at HFR.

Two factors have motivated the current interest in HFR. The obvious one is that actions recorded at more rapid frame rates, such as a car chase shot at 48 fps vs 24 fps, would reduce by half the distance objects move across successive frames. With HFR we are presented shorter increments of movement, and our brains need not work as hard to extrapolate apparent motion across frames, which may result in a smoother sense of motion. I, however, do not think that it is this between-frame difference that is driving our sensory experience as we watch The Hobbit. A second, less known factor, is that the movie was shot at a faster shutter speed than movies shot at 24 fps. Filmmakers have a rule that states that the shutter speed at which each frame is shot should be half as long as the frame duration. Thus, most movies we’ve seen have been shot at 24 fps with a shutter speed of 1/48 sec for each frame. Those of you who have played with photography know that this shutter speed would produce rather blurry images when the camera is hand held. On a tripod, a movie filmed with this shutter speed would show fast moving objects (e.g., cars) with a noticeable blur. When movies filmed at 24 fps are shot with a faster shutter speed and less motion blur, actions appear jerky and unnatural.

The Hobbit was filmed with a shutter speed of 1/64 sec, which produced less motion blur and thus sharper images compared to movies shot at 24 fps. At the faster frame rate, the jerkiness associated with presenting sharp images at 24 fps is largely reduced, though I did notice that on some occasions large camera movements and fast movements of actors appeared stilted and unnatural. A psychological study by Kuroki and colleagues showed that in order to perceive naturalistic movements with sharp moving images (i.e., no motion blur) it is necessary to use frame rates of 250 fps or faster. Interestingly, the shutter speed used for The Hobbit closely matches that used for old videotaped TV programs, which were filmed at 30 fps with a shutter speed of 1/60 sec. I suspect that it is this close match in shutter speed (and thus similarity in image sharpness) that creates the impression of viewing a soap opera when we watch Bilbo Baggins and company.

In the future, after years of experiencing HFR movies, will we be able to appreciate the more realistic renderings garnered by this new technology? Will a younger generation without prior associations to videotaped TV programs be enamored by the sharper images? Time will tell, though I’m skeptical. HFR does offer a more realistic rendering than what we’ve previously encountered at the movies, and further advances may help to refine its use. Yet do we really want to have an entirely realistic portrayal? In most cases that would mean having the experience of sitting next to the director watching actors on a sound stage with artificial lighting, which is exactly the impression I had while watching Bilbo backlit by what was supposed to be moonlight. Instead, we may end up preferring a softer image which maintains the illusion of being engaged in an adventure with our favorite fictional characters and partaking in a wonderfully unexpected journey.

Arthur P. Shimamura is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He studies the psychological and biological underpinnings of memory and movies. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to study links between art, mind, and brain. He is co-editor of Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (Shimamura & Palmer, ed., OUP, 2012), editor of the forthcoming Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies (ed., OUP, March 2013), and author of the forthcoming book, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder (May 2013). Further musings can be found on his blog, http://psychocinematics.blogspot.com.

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There is a deep and pervasive hunger for a less fragmented and more integrated way of understanding and inhabiting the world. What must change if we are to live in a sustainable relationship with other organisms? What role do our moral and spiritual values play in responding to the ecological crisis? We sat down with Douglas E. Christie, author of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, to discuss a contemplative approach to ecological thought and practice that can help restore our sense of the earth as a sacred place.

What is the blue sapphire of the mind?

It is an image used by Evagrius of Pontus, a fourth century Christian monk, to describe the condition of the mind transformed by contemplative practice: it is pure and endless and serene, capable of seeing and experiencing union with everything and everyone.

What is “contemplative ecology” and what does it have to do with this idea?

Contemplative ecology has two distinct but related meanings. First, it refers to a particular way of thinking about and engaging ecological concerns, rooted in a distinctive form of contemplative spiritual practice. Second, it refers to a particular way of thinking about spiritual practice, one that understands the work of transforming awareness as leading toward and including a deepened understanding of the intricate relationships among and between all living beings. The underlying concern is to find new ways of thinking about the meaning and significance of the relationship between ecological concern and contemplative spiritual practice, that can help to ground sustained care for the environment in a deep feeling for the living world.

What possible meaning do you think such a contemplative approach can have in an age of massive and growing environmental degradation?

Contemplative traditions of spiritual practice, including those grounded in monastic forms of living, have long occupied the margins of mainstream society. The work of such communities is often hidden from view. Because of this, their contributions to work of social and political transformation can seem, on the face of it, negligible. But a careful examination of the historical record suggests that such communities have contributed and continue to contribute significantly to the project of cultural, social and even political renewal — primarily through their unwavering commitment to uncovering the deepest sources of our bonds with one another and with the living world. In our own moment of ecological and political crisis, these traditions of contemplative thought and practice can help to awaken in us a new awareness of the deepest sources of our shared concern for the world.

Is this a matter of particular concern to religious communities?

Yes, and no. Certainly, environmental degradation is a concern that religious communities around the world are waking up to in a new way, and this includes the particular contributions of monastic communities. But the distinctively contemplative dimension of this renewal transcends religion (at least in narrow terms) and touches on a wider and more fundamental human concern: to truly know ourselves as part of the rich web of life. Contemplative ecology addresses anyone who wishes to think more deeply and carefully about what it is to be alive and attentive to the natural world, and to respond with care and affection.

Douglas E. Christie is Professor of Theological Studies, Loyola Marymount University, and the author of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology and The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism.

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By Lara Alcock

Two contrasting experiences stick in mind from my first year at university.

First, I spent a lot of time in lectures that I did not understand. I don’t mean lectures in which I got the general gist but didn’t quite follow the technical details. I mean lectures in which I understood not one thing from the beginning to the end. I still went to all the lectures and wrote everything down – I was a dutiful sort of student – but this was hardly the ideal learning experience.

Second, at the end of the year, I was awarded first class marks. The best thing about this was that later that evening, a friend came up to me in the bar and said, “Hey Lara, I hear you got a first!” and I was rapidly surrounded by other friends offering enthusiastic congratulations. This was a revelation. I had attended the kind of school at which students who did well were derided rather than congratulated. I was delighted to find myself in a place where success was celebrated.

Looking back, I think that the interesting thing about these two experiences is the relationship between the two. How could I have done so well when I understood so little of so many lectures?

I don’t think that there was a problem with me. I didn’t come out at the very top, but obviously I had the ability and dedication to get to grips with the mathematics. Nor do I think that there was a problem with the lecturers. Like the vast majority of the mathematicians I have met since, my lecturers cared about their courses and put considerable effort into giving a logically coherent presentation. Not all were natural entertainers, but there was nothing fundamentally wrong with their teaching.

I now think that the problems were more subtle, and related to two issues in particular.

First, there was a communication gap: the lecturers and I did not understand mathematics in the same way. Mathematicians understand mathematics as a network of axioms, definitions, examples, algorithms, theorems, proofs, and applications.  They present and explain these, hoping that students will appreciate the logic of the ideas and will think about the ways in which they can be combined. I didn’t really know how to learn effectively from lectures on abstract material, and research indicates that I was pretty typical in this respect.

Students arrive at university with a set of expectations about what it means to ‘do mathematics’ – about what kind of information teachers will provide and about what students are supposed to do with it. Some of these expectations work well at school but not at university. Many students need to learn, for instance, to treat definitions as stipulative rather than descriptive, to generate and check their own examples, to interpret logical language in a strict, mathematical way rather than a more flexible, context-influenced way, and to infer logical relationships within and across mathematical proofs. These things are expected, but often they are not explicitly taught.

My second problem was that I didn’t have very good study skills. I wasn’t terrible – I wasn’t lazy, or arrogant, or easily distracted, or unwilling to put in the hours. But I wasn’t very effective in deciding how to spend my study time. In fact, I don’t remember making many conscious decisions about it at all. I would try a question, find it difficult, stare out of the window, become worried, attempt to study some section of my lecture notes instead, fail at that too, and end up discouraged. Again, many students are like this. I have met a few who probably should have postponed university until they were ready to exercise some self-discipline, but most do want to learn.

What they lack is a set of strategies for managing their learning – for deciding how to distribute their time when no-one is checking what they’ve done from one class to the next, and for maintaining momentum when things get difficult. Many could improve their effectiveness by doing simple things like systematically prioritizing study tasks, and developing a routine in which they study particular subjects in particular gaps between lectures.  Again, the responsibility for learning these skills lies primarily with the student.

Personally, I never got to a point where I understood every lecture. But I learned how to make sense of abstract material, I developed strategies for studying effectively, and I maintained my first class marks. What I would now say to current students is this: take charge. Find out what lecturers and tutors are expecting, and take opportunities to learn about good study habits. Students who do that should find, like I did, that undergraduate mathematics is challenging, but a pleasure to learn.

Lara Alcock is a Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough University. She has taught both mathematics and mathematics education to undergraduates and postgraduates in the UK and the US. She conducts research on the ways in which undergraduates and mathematicians learn and think about mathematics, and she was recently awarded the Selden Prize for Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. She is the author of How to Study for a Mathematics Degree (2012, UK) and How to Study as a Mathematics Major (2013, US).

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By E. Tory Higgins

“Our country is divided.” “Congress is broken.” “Our politics are polarized.” Most Americans believe there is less political co-operation and compromise than there used to be. And we know who is to blame for this situation—it’s our political opponents. Democrats know that Republicans are to blame, and Republicans know that Democrats are to blame. Not only do we know that our political opponents are to blame, but we are suspicious of their motives, of why they take the positions they take. Bottom line: we can’t trust them.

This is a serious problem for our country. One source of the problem is a misperception of what really motivates people’s political opinions, judgments, and actions. People often assume such opinions are all about self-interest or all about “carrots and sticks.” As Romney recently put it, “What the president’s campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote, and that strategy worked.” Plenty of commentators criticized the reference to minorities, the poor, and students as essentially being paid off for their votes, but few if any disputed the overall assumption that the “carrots” candidates offer voters determine the vote. Indeed, the field of ‘public choice’ in economics assumes just this, that voters are guided by their own self-interest and “vote their pocketbooks.”

What does it mean for our political conversation to assume that the opinions, judgments, and actions of our political opponents are motivated by self-interest? It means that their stands on political issues are selfish rather than being in the best interest of our country. We can’t trust them to be concerned about what is best for the rest of us because our interests are different than their interests. We assume that they do not have good will. But what if people are not primarily motivated by self-interest (by “carrots”) in the political domain or in any other domain of life? In fact, there is substantial evidence from research on human motivation that what people want goes well beyond attaining “carrots” (or “gifts”). What they want is to be effective.

Yes, one way of being effective is to have desired outcomes, which can include attaining “carrots” (and avoiding “sticks”). But there is much more to being effective. People also want to be effective at establishing what’s real or right or correct (being effective in finding the truth), as when people want to hear the truth about themselves or what is happening in their lives even if “the truth hurts.” Indeed, people want to observe, discover, and learn about all kinds of things in the world that have nothing to do with their attaining “carrots” (or avoiding “sticks”). And people also want to manage what happens, to have an effect on the world (being effective in having control), as when children jump up and down in a puddle just to make a splash. Indeed, people will take on pain and even risk injury to feel in control of a difficult and challenging activity, as illustrated most vividly in extreme sports.

It is establishing what’s real (truth) and managing what happens (control) that often are our primary motivations — rather than self-interest — and this is both good news and bad news if we are to change the political conversation. The bad news is that humans, uniquely among animals, establish truth by sharing reality with others who agree with their beliefs (or with whom they can establish agreed-upon assumptions). And when they do create a shared reality with others, they experience their beliefs as objective — the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This means that when others disagree with these beliefs, as when Democrats and Republicans disagree with each other, each side is so certain that what they believe is reality, that they infer that those on the other side must either be lying about what they truly believe or they are too stupid to recognize the truth or they are simply crazy. These derogations of our political opponents don’t derive from our self-interests being in conflict with them. It is more serious than that. It derives from the establishment of a different shared reality to them, a shared reality that we are highly motivated to maintain because it gives us the truth about the how the world works.

This is bad news indeed. But if we understand that out political opponents just want to be effective in truth, there is a ‘good news’ silver lining. The good news is that we need not characterize our political opponents as being selfish, or liars, or stupid, or crazy. We need not question their good will. Instead, we can recognize that they, like us, want truth and control, and they want truth and control to work together effectively. They want to “go in the right direction.” They, like us, want our country to be strong. They want Americans to live in peace and prosperity. Yes, they have different ideas about what direction is the right one to make this happen, but this is something we can discuss. In order to establish what’s real, manage what happens, and go in the right direction — which are ways of being effective that we all want — we need to listen to one another and and learn from one another. This is a political conversation worth having. Let us have that respectful, serious conversation in the New Year and search for common ground. Good will to all.

E. Tory Higgins is the author of Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He has received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the William James Fellow Award for Distinguished Achievements in Psychological Science (from the Association for Psychological Science), and the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions. He is also a recipient of Columbia’s Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.

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By Dean Falk, Fred Lepore, and Adrianne Noe

Imagine that you return from work to find that a thief has broken into your home. The police arrive and ask if they may dust for finger and palm prints. Which would you do? (A) Refuse permission because palm reading is an antiquated pseudoscience or (B) give permission because forensic dermatoglyphics is sometimes useful for identifying culprits. A similar question may be asked about the photographs of the external surface of Albert Einstein’s brain that recently emerged after being lost to science for over half a century. If asked whether details of Einstein’s cerebral cortex should be identified and interpreted from the photographs, which would you answer? (A) No, because to conduct such a study would engage in the 19^th century pseudoscience of phrenology or (B) Yes, because the investigation could produce interesting observations about the cerebral cortex of one of the world’s greatest geniuses and, in light of recent functional neuroimaging studies, might also suggest potentially testable hypotheses regarding Einstein’s brain and those of normal individuals. Lest you think this is a straw man (or Aunt Sally) exercise, more than one pundit has recently invoked the phrenology argument against studying Einstein’s brain. For example, one blogger opines, “I hope no one cares about Einstein’s brain. By this I mean his brain anatomy.” The three of us who were privileged to describe the treasure-trove of recently emerged photographs opted for B.

We did so because various data support studying the variation and functional correlates of folds (gyri) on the surface of the human brain and the grooves (sulci) that separate them. For example, David Van Essen hypothesizes that tensions along the connections between cells that course beneath the surface of the brain explains typical patterns of convolutions on its surface. Disruptions in the development of these connections in humans may result in abnormal convolutions that are associated with neurological problems such as autism and schizophrenia.  Representations in sensory and motor regions of the cerebral cortex may change later in life as shown by imaging studies of Braille readers, upper limb amputees, and trained musicians, and sometimes these adaptations are correlated with superficial neuroanatomical features such as an enlargement in the right precentral gyrus (called the Omega Sign because of its shape) associated with movement of the left hand in expert string-players. Indeed, Einstein’s right hemisphere has an Omega Sign (labeled K in the following photograph, for knob), which is consistent with the fact that he was a right-handed string-player who took violin lessons between the ages of 6 and 14 years. The aforementioned blogger supports his opposition to studying Einstein’s cerebral cortex with the observation that “assuming causality with correlation” is “a cardinal sin of science”. However, this old saw does not mean that correlated features are necessarily causally unrelated. The functional imaging literature on the cerebral cortices of musicians and controls suggests that Einstein’s Omega Sign and his history as a violinist were probably not an unrelated coincidence.

The investigation of previously unpublished photographs of Einstein’s brain reveals numerous unusual cortical features which suggest hypotheses that others may wish to explore in the histological slides of Einstein’s brain that surfaced along with the photographs. For example, Einstein’s brain has an unusually long midfrontal sulcus that divides the middle frontal region into two distinct gyri (labeled 2 & 3 in the following image), which causes his right frontal lobe to have four rather than the typical three gyri. An extra frontal gyrus is rare, but not unheard of. Einstein’s frontal lobe morphology is interesting because the human frontal polar region expanded differentially during hominin evolution, is involved in higher cognitive functions (including thought experiments), and is associated with complex wiring underneath its surface. These data suggest that the connectivity associated with Einstein’s prefrontal cortex may have been relatively complex, which could potentially be explored by investigating histological slides that were prepared from his brain after it was dissected.

 The microstructural organization in the parts of the cerebral cortex that are involved heavily in speech (Broca’s area and its homologue) were shown to be unique in their patterns of connectivity and lateralization in the genius Emil Krebs, who spoke more than 60 languages. That study, however, did not include information about the gross external neuroanatomy in the relevant regions. Functional neuroimaging technology is making it possible to explore the functional relationships between variations in external cortical morphology, subsurface microstructure including neuronal connectivity, and cognitive abilities. In other words, scientists should now be able to analyze form and function cohesively from the external surface of the cerebral cortex into the depths of the brain. Pseudoscience this is not.

Dr Dean Falk is the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University and a Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Dr Fred Lepore is Professor of Neurology and Ophthalmology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey. Dr Adrianne Noe is Director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland. You can read their paper, ‘The cerebral cortex of Albert Einstein: a description and preliminary analysis of unpublished photographs’ in full and for free. It appears in the journal Brain.

Brain provides researchers and clinicians with the finest original contributions in neurology. Leading studies in neurological science are balanced with practical clinical articles. Its citation rating is one of the highest for neurology journals, and it consistently publishes papers that become classics in the field.

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Image credits: Both images are authors’ own. Do not reproduce without prior permission from the authors.

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The Mayo Clinic Scientific Press suite of publications is now available on Oxford Medicine Online. To highlight some of the great resources, we’ve pulled together some interesting facts about the esphophagus from Stephen Hauser’s Mayo Clinic Gastroenterology and Hepatology Board Review.

(1) The esophagus has two major functions: to propel food boluses downward to the stomach and to keep stomach contents from refluxing upward. The esophagus accomplishes these functions by its tubular anatomy and motility that involves the contraction and relaxation of sphincter muscles and precisely timed peristaltic waves.

(2) The initial process of swallowing is under voluntary control. A swallow is initiated by the lips closing, the teeth clenching, and the tongue being elevated against the palate, forcing the bolus to the pharynx. Entry of the bolus into the pharynx triggers the involuntary swallowing reflex.

(3) Oropharyngeal dysphagia is often characterized by the complaint of difficulty initiating a swallow, transitioning the food bolus or liquid into the esophagus, meal-induced coughing or “choking,” or of food “getting stuck” in the voluntary phase of swallowing.

(4) Patients with an esophageal body or LES disorder describe “esophageal dysphagia” characterized by the onset of symptoms moments after the initiation of a swallow. They usually can sense that the food or liquid bolus has traversed the oral cavity and has entered the esophagus. They complain of food feeling “stuck” or “hung up” in transition to the stomach.

(5) Gastroesophageal reflux is the reflux of gastric contents other than air into or through the esophagus. Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) refers to reflux that produces frequent symptoms or results in damage to the esophageal mucosa or contiguous organs of the upper aerodigestive system and occasionally the lower respiratory tract.

Gastroenterology and hepatology encompass a vast anatomical assortment of organs that have diverse structure and function and potentially are afflicted by a multiplicity of disease processes. Mayo Clinic Gastroenterology and Hepatology Board Review is designed to assist both physicians in-training who are preparing for the gastroenterology board examination and the increasing number of gastroenterologists awaiting recertification.

The Mayo Clinic Scientific Press suite of publications is now available on Oxford Medicine Online. With full-text titles from Mayo Clinic clinicians and a bank of 3,000 multiple-choice questions, Mayo Clinic Toolkit provides a single location for residents, fellows, and practicing clinicians to undertake the self-testing necessary to prepare for, and pass, the Boards and remain up-to-date. Oxford Medicine Online is an interconnected collection of over 250 online medical resources which cover every stage in a medical career, for medical students and junior doctors, to resources for senior doctors and consultants. Oxford Medicine Online has relaunched with a brand new look and feel and enhanced functionality. Our aim is to ensure that the site continues to deliver the highest quality Oxford content whilst meeting the requirements of the busy student, doctor, or health professional working in a digital world.

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By Siegfried Weyerer

Depression in old age occurs frequently, places a severe burden on patients and relatives, and increases the utilization of medical services and health care costs. Although the association between age and depression has received considerable attention, very little is known about the incidence of depression among those 75 years of age and older. Studies that treat the group 65+ as one entity are often heavily weighted towards the age group 65-75. Therefore, the prediction of depression in the very old is uncertain, since many community-based studies lack adequate samples over the age of 75.

With the demographic change in the forthcoming decades, more emphasis should be put on epidemiological studies of the older old, since in many countries the increase in this age group will be particularly high. To study the older old is also important, since some crucial risk factors such as bereavement, social isolation, somatic diseases, and functional impairment become more common with increasing age. These factors may exert different effects in the younger old compared to the older old. Knowledge of risk factors is a prerequisite to designing tailored interventions, either to tackle the factors themselves or to define high-risk groups, since depression is treatable in most cases.

In our recent study, over 3,000 patients recruited by GPs in Germany were assessed by means of structured clinical interviews conducted by trained physicians and psychologists during visits to the participants’ homes. Inclusion criteria for GP patients were an age of 75 years and over, the absence of dementia in the GP’s view, and at least one contact with the GP within the last 12 months. The two follow-up examinations were done, on average, one and a half and then three years after the initial interview.

Depressive symptoms were ascertained using the 15-item version of the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS). We found that the risk for incident depression was significantly higher for subjects

• 85 years and older
• with mobility impairment and vision impairment
• with mild cognitive impairment and subjective memory impairment
• who were current smokers.

It revealed that the incidence of late-life depression in Germany and other industrialized countries is substantial, and neither educational level, marital status, living situation nor presence of chronic diseases contributed to the incidence of depression. Impairments of mobility and vision are much more likely to cause incidents of depression than individual somatic illnesses such as diabetes mellitus and coronary heart disease. As such, it is vital that more attention is paid to the oldest old, functional impairment, cognitive impairment, and smoking, when designing depression prevention programs.

GP practices offers ample opportunity to treat mental health problems such as depression occurring in relation to physical disability. If functional impairment causes greater likelihood of depression, GPs should focus on encouraging older patients to maintain physical health, whether by changing in personal health habits, advocating exercise, correcting or compensating functional deficits by means of medical and surgical treatments, or encouraging use of walking aids. Additionally, cognitive and memory training could prevent the onset of depressive symptoms, as could smoking cessation. If these steps are taken, the burden of old age depression could be significantly reduced.

Siegfried Weyerer is professor of epidemiology at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. He has conducted several national and international studies on the epidemiology of dementia, depression and substance use disorders at different care levels. He is also an expert in health/nursing services research. He is one of the authors of the paper ‘Incidence and predictors of depression in non-demented primary care attenders aged 75 years and older: results from a 3-year follow-up study’, which appears in the journal Age and Ageing. You can read the paper in full here.

Age and Ageing is an international journal publishing refereed original articles and commissioned reviews on geriatric medicine and gerontology. Its range includes research on ageing and clinical, epidemiological, and psychological aspects of later life.

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By Richard Hain

One of the things that has always puzzled me is the number of palliative care services that have the word ‘pain’ in the title. Why do we concentrate so much on that one, admittedly unpleasant, symptom? Why ‘Pain and Palliative Care Services’ rather than, for example, ‘Vomiting and Palliative Care Service’ , ‘Dyspnoea and Palliative Care Service’, or even ‘Sadness, Anger, Existential Anguish and Palliative Care Service’?

That’s the problem with trying to describe palliative care. The whole point of palliative care is that it is holistic – a word that has acquired a certain flakiness, but which in reality simply refers to looking at the wholeness of a person, rather than focusing on only one domain (such as physical symptoms), or even one specific symptom (such as pain). But the purpose of a definition, by definition, is to set limits around a concept. There is a sense in which defining something as holistic is a contradiction in terms. Yet that is what we have to do in palliative care, if we are to communicate some sense of the task of caring for children and adults with life-limiting conditions; a sense that encompasses both the idea that it is holistic and that it is specialist (there are some things you need to learn to do to do it well).

The clue to the nature of palliative care is in the name: ‘care’.  It is a care whose aim is not cure. In the United Kingdom, we have recently seen the results of misunderstanding what palliative care is all about. As in most countries that are resource-rich (or, at least, would have considered themselves as such before the global recession), the United Kingdom sometimes struggles to avoid the temptation to over-intervene. Even where it is overwhelmingly unlikely that an intervention will help – such as when death is inevitable – we in resource-rich countries can’t help ourselves. Sometimes we have to do something even if we know it is more likely to damage a patient – considered holistically – than it is to help them. That is not because anyone is trying to be cruel, but simply because if you are a doctor faced with a very sick patient, it is hard not to intervene, even when the latter option would truly be the right thing to do.

So, if you want to improve the lives of people who are close to death, one really good way to do it is to offer doctors more support in doing less, and in doing it well.  The Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient (LCP) was designed to do exactly that.  Its sole purpose has been to protect dying patients from the pain and indignity of useless interventions around the end of their life.  Sadly, holding back on those interventions that will harm people can sometimes look, at least to the untutored eye, very like deliberately killing them.  Even some philosophers find it tricky to admit that killing someone is not at all the same thing as refusing to try to prevent their inevitable death. So perhaps it is not surprising to find that, in trying to see who were the baddies here, the Daily Mail crashed clumsily down on the wrong side, screaming that babies were being euthanised using the Liverpool Care Pathway.  But it isn’t true.

The Liverpool Care Pathway hasn’t really found its way into children’s care, despite the Daily Mail‘s assertions. That’s because it was designed for adults, mainly with cancer, rather than for children and the much larger range of conditions that can cause their death.  There’s nothing wrong with the concept. As in adults, the art and science of palliative care in children is to preserve wellbeing as far as possible, using all the tools at our disposal.  To do that often means introducing some interventions – some medication, perhaps, or the opportunity to talk about fears, or the chance to decide where you or your child should die.  But improving wellbeing can equally mean withholding interventions that would be likely to cause an overall damage to it.  Good paediatric palliative care must mean knowing what procedures to leave out, as well as knowing which ones to introduce.  Whatever some moral philosophers say, there is a big difference between actively hastening someone’s death, and not trying fruitlessly to prevent death when to do so would mean making life worse.  And whatever the Daily Mail may confidently claim, putting a patient on the Liverpool Care Pathway is not the same as euthanasia.  Care pathways are pointers to the best way to avoid careless and harmful over-intervention.  Properly used, palliation and pathways do exactly what they say on the tin; they care.

Dr Richard Hain is Consultant and Lead Clinician at the Wales Managed Clinical Network in Paediatric Palliative Care Children’s Hospital, and Visiting Professor at the University of Glamorgan, and Honorary Senior Lecturer at Bangor University. He is co-editor of the Oxford Textbook of Palliative Care for Children, Second Edition (OUP, 2012), with Ann Goldman and Stephen Liben.

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By Anthony Scioli

From late December to the middle of January it is obligatory for people to make one or more New Years’ resolutions. Recent surveys reveal that the most common resolutions made by Americans include losing weight, getting fit, quitting smoking, quitting drinking, reducing debt, or getting organized. This list dovetails perfectly (unfortunately) with an international study of 24 character strengths which revealed that Americans rate themselves lowest in the virtue of “self-regulation”.

Ironically the other leading American resolutions involving getting or doing more rather than having or doing less. Americans want more socializing, more joy, and more learning. We want less and we want more. Should anyone be surprised that resolutions often fail to bring about lasting change?

Less than a handful of psychological studies have been done on New Years’ resolutions. There is scant advice in the database for the layperson to glean except that resolutions are more likely to be successful if an individual is more motivated and a goal is perceived as more important. This is not very helpful “self-help”.

As a psychologist, I would suggest that instead of a piecemeal focus on narrow goals that is bound to fail, people should aim for a higher horizon, a commitment to a more hopeful way of life.

Deep below the surface of many desperate resolutions reside the most primitive fears. The dramatic turn of the calendar on December 31^st is a reminder of finitude on many levels, most poignantly, the fact that an individual has one less year. In the northern hemisphere this reminder comes when the nights are long and wind blows hard and cold. However, regardless of where one lives, a different freeze may be felt, what the existentialists call an “ego chill”, the sudden and full awareness that one day you will cease to exist.

The projected fears of the New Year are the same as the deathbed regrets of the dying. They are the twin fears of a self-aware being. “Did I live to my life to the fullest?” Have I have left a mark on the world?”

There is a strong need to feel that one did not leave too much unlived life “on the table”. Emerson put it this way:

“Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day”.

Human beings also fear the specter of oblivion. Aristotle went so far as to coin the term entelechy to refer to an essential momentum within all living things to continue to be or exist, without end, in one form or another. I believe that we all have some form of entelechy etched into our DNA.

In Living A Life That Matters, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote, “In my forty years as a rabbi, I have tended to many people in the last moments of their lives…The people who had the most trouble with death were those who felt that they had never done anything worthwhile in their lives, and if God would only give them another two or three years, maybe they would finally get it right. It was not death that frightened them; it was insignificance, the fear that they would die and leave no mark on the world.”

The answer to this existential dilemma is to live a double-life. You should balance being anchored in the here and now with investments focused on a more transcendent plane. The scientific psychology of the 20^th century focused more and more on the here and now. The most obvious, and in my view, overrated example of this is the concept of “mindfulness”. At best, mindfulness, or an intentional, nonjudgmental awareness of the present is a corrective Eastern strategy for the distracted and hurried mind of the West. It is not a full program for living. Not only is it impractical to live just for the present but such a philosophy does not match up with the architecture of the brain which is dominated by the frontal lobes and other structures designed for projecting into the future or preserving the past. Human beings were meant to live in 3D, the past, present, and future.

In contrast, the American psychology of the 19^th century was initially influenced by “moral philosophy”. From about 1850 to 1890, it was not uncommon for psychologists to focus on more transcendent issues such as character, values, religion, or coping with death. In the 21^st century we need a more integrated philosophy.

Living a “Double – Life”

There is an old adage that “where there is life there is hope”. I would turn this around. I believe where there is hope, there is life. I understand hope as a composite of four basic needs: attachment (trust and openness), mastery (purpose and collaboration), survival (self-regulation and liberation), and spirituality (empowerment, connection, and salvation linked to a larger perceived force or entity). If you want to live more fully in the here and now while also investing in something more enduring, commit in 2013 to a life that includes more time for building and nurturing relationships, for articulating a mission in life, for increasing your perceived degrees of freedom, and for spiritual fulfillment. You will not only feel happier on a daily basis, but you will be far more likely to build an enduring legacy. Towards this end, I offer eight recommendations, two each for the four cardinal elements of hope (one for the left brain and one for the right brain).

Attachment

Attachments may be the most significant sources of hope. Note that even the perennial classics of the holiday season such as A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, and the Auld Lang Syne song (Should Old Acquaintance be forgot, and never thought upon?) all deal with the primacy of relationships.

For left brain attachment read Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. For your right brain, follow this up with a live viewing of his play, Our Town. If you are seeking inspiration to nurture your relationships, it is difficult to find two better sources.

Mastery

Six months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Spoke about mastery to a group of Junior High School Students in Philadelphia.

“If it is your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

For left brain mastery, go to the positive psychology website at the University of Pennsylvania and take their VIA Survey of Character Strengths. Find out what your top five strengths are and find ways to craft your life around these virtues. For right brain mastery, listen to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Survival

Survival hope is strongly infused with a sense of liberation. In contrast, the most common experience in hopelessness is a sense of entrapment. The psychologist Rollo May contrasted freedom of doing with freedom of being. To maximize your freedom of doing, May suggested making the most of your potential or taking advantage of various forms of fate or destiny such as your genetics or time and place of birth. He also noted that when your freedom of doing is restricted, as a human being, you always have the freedom to be, to adopt a particular attitude.

For left brain survival hope, I would read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. As a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, Frankl describes how he found hope by maximizing both types of freedom. For right brain survival hope I would follow Frankl with a viewing (or re-viewing) of the film Life is Beautiful.

Spirituality

For left brain spiritual development reflect on your spiritual type. Spiritual needs and passions will flow from your particular type. Are you a mystic seeking a sense of oneness? Are you a follower seeking structure? Are you an independent seeking support for a chosen path? Are you a collaborator looking to join forces with a powerful other? Are you a sufferer who seeks comfort? Are you a reformer seeking justice? For right brain spiritual development, I would review your list of favorite songs and find one or two that match up with your spiritual type and play them often in 2013. You can find music consistent with your particular religious affiliation that will nevertheless address your particular spiritual type. Here are six suggestions: For independent types: the Chariots of Fire theme; for followers, “Amazing Grace”; for collaborators, “Lord of the Dance”; for mystics, “Unchained Melody”; for sufferers, “Let It Be” (the Beatles); for reformers, “A Change is Gonna Come” (Sam Cooke).

Anthony Scioli is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Keene State College. He is the co-author of Hope in the Age of Anxiety with Henry Biller. Dr. Scioli completed Harvard fellowships in human motivation and behavioral medicine. He co-authored the chapter on emotion for the Encyclopedia of Mental Health and currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Positive Psychology and the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Read his previous blog articles: “Why spring is the season of hope” and “Contrasting profiles in hope.”

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By Karen Schiltz, Ph.D.

“My child could be the next mass murderer. Alex has bipolar disorder. Last year, he pulled a phone off of the wall in the classroom and threw it at the teacher. They evacuated the whole class and my son was suspended for one day. He was suspended five times in nursery school for hitting children. Alex screams at home, swears, throws his toys against the wall, has hit his sister more times that I can tell, and can’t pay attention for the life of him now. He does not like the word ‘no.’ Alex is eight and in second grade. I’m afraid and something has to be done. I’m glad we are dealing with this now. I have to face this.”

I saw the parents of Alex Monday morning.

Like many of you, I was in shock and horrified about the slaughtering of 20 little children and 6 adults. I wondered: why did Adam Lanza not receive help for his condition or, if he did, was he misdiagnosed? Did his parents not follow through with providers? Did providers fail to address his problems? Were the parents in denial? Were teachers in denial?

“I’m scared. I see things at night like shadows and I hear soldiers that are coming to get me at night. I ran into daddy and mommy’s room. I saw something black when I was running to my mommy’s room. Someone is whispering to me too. I hear whispers and voices. I don’t understand what they are saying.”

Alex was eager to tell me about the voices and sounds he heard. He also told me that his parents were oftentimes angry at home and he was always scared of what could happen next.

His parents told me about several warning signs that increased in severity, intensity, and frequency as Alex aged. They were:

• Fears of attending school
• Hearing sounds such as whispers and soldiers conversing with each other
• Nightmares
• Poor frustration tolerance
• Problems managing his anger
• Real shifts in mood ranging from deep sadness to silliness
• Trouble concentrating
• Trouble sleeping
• Withdrawal from family and friends
• Wringing of hands and complaints of stomachaches

Do these parents need counseling? Does Alex need help as well? Will the parents accept my feedback after I assessed their child, interviewed Alex’s teachers and them, and conducted the testing?

Monday had a happy ending. These parents were not in denial nor did they deny Alex had a problem. They realized early intervention was crucial to helping their child. Alex’s parents were aware that their son’s marked troubles with managing his anger, low frustration tolerance, problems with focusing, and his ability to “go from 0 to 100” in a split second of rage were not normal. They deeply wanted a typical eight-year-old boy before it was too late.

It is not too late for lots of children. All of us, including teachers, physicians, and other care-taking and healthcare professionals need to listen to and observe children when something is not quite right. Taking the time to talk with children and educate parents about the warning signs of mental illness is critical.

Assessment and early intervention are the keys to unlocking the cause of a child’s pain and other problems such as a reading disorder. We can help children if we intervene at an early age and recognize the signs of mental illness such as mood instability, sadness, irritability, and anxiety. Many children need help and aren’t getting it. Recognizing a child’s struggles as early as possible is key to optimizing their success in life and overall mental health. The tragedy can be when it is not addressed in time to help either the victim or aggressor.

The bottom line is: we need to review the big picture of what is happening with our children and help parents advocate for their child when something is a little off. It was not too late for Alex and it shouldn’t be for your child either.

Karen Schiltz is the co-author of Beyond The Label: A Guide to Unlocking a Child’s Educational Potential and Associate Clinical Professor (volunteer) at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has over 26 years of experience assessing children and young adults with developmental, medical, and emotional disorders including the autistic spectrum and maintains a private practice specializing in neuropsychology in Calabasas, California. Dr. Schiltz blogs for Psychology Today at Beyond the Label.

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