I’ve never been immortalized in song, but these 7 women have. How many of the stories do you know?
Bonus points to anyone identifying the title song and band.
Answer: Heard It In A Love Song by the Marshall Tucker Band circa 1976
38 years ago today, I joined a dozen of my aunts, uncles and cousins crowded into the small living room of my cousin Lanny’s house. As the owner of the only color tv among us, he hosted the moon party by default. We all sat glued to the screen as Neil Armstrong said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” as he took that long step down from the lunar lander and bounced across the surface to plant a stiff American flag.
I was disappointed it was in black and white. But it was magic, and I never looked up at the stars the same way again.
From Yahoo News:
Older women with memory problems are more likely to have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep than those without memory loss, a U.S. study finds.
The study included almost 2,500 women, average age 69, with no signs of memory problems at the start of the study. They underwent cognitive tests over a period of 15 years and, at the end of the study, were assessed for sleep problems.
Women who showed signs of mental decline on the tests “were nearly twice as likely to have difficulty staying asleep and one-and-a-half times as likely to have problems falling asleep and being awake for more than 90 minutes during their sleep cycle,” study author Dr. Kristine Yaffe, of the University of California, San Francisco, said in a prepared statement.
Interesting theory. However, in my own experience it works the other way around: sleep disturbances, then memory problems and other psych symptoms. I don’t think I’m the only one. I’d like to know if they managed to separate the two.
In 1996, Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici succeeded in getting the Mental Health Parity Act passed into law. The law did not require insurance companies to cover mental illnesses, but if they did, they could not set lower dollar limits on care than they did for other conditions. Insurance companies responded by removing the monetary ceilings, but substituted a maximum number of visits and inpatient days which effectively did the same thing. Those with mental illness continued to be second class citizens.
In 2002, after the death of Sen. Wellstone’s death, the bill was renamed the Paul Wellstone Equitable Treatment Act and had 68 cosponsors in the Senate and 245 cosponsors in the House, from both sides of the isle. Yet the bill was held up in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, chaired by Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) and despite repeated assurances from Senator Gregg and Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), the bill failed to move out of committee.
This week, a House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Rob Andrews (D - NJ), heard testimony regarding the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act (H.R. 1424), which ensures that mental health and addiction patients are treated no differently than other medical or surgical patients. Like it’s predecessor, the Wellstone Act does not force companies to offer mental health or addiction treatment benefits, but if such benefits are covered, they must be offered in the same manner as other medical and surgical coverage in the plan.
Learn more at Wellstone Action! then contact your legislators and voice your support for this measure.
Hat tip to Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write
Girls who complain about their problems at greater risk of developing anxiety and depression How’s that for an attention grabbing headline? It’s the lead on a press release put out by the University of Missouri-Columbia about a study done by associate psychology professor Amanda Rose on co-ruminating: excessively talking with friends about problems and concerns.
Some of the quotes attributed to Ms. Rose are very alarming. “Co-rumination also may lead to depression and anxiety because it takes so much time – time that could be used to engage in other, more positive activities that could help distract youth from their problems. This is especially true for problems that girls can’t control, such as whether a particular boy likes them, or whether they get invited to a party that all of the popular kids are attending.”
“Some kids, especially girls, are taking talking about problems to an extreme. When that happens, the balance tips, and talking about problems with friends can become emotionally unhealthy.”
“They also should engage in other activities, like sports, which can help them take their minds off their problems, especially problems that they can’t control,” she said.
In other words, adolescent girls confiding in their best friends are making themselves sick. Very disturbing indeed. Since mental health, including that of teenagers, is of great interest to me, I searched out the journal publishing the study hoping to learn more, and was lucky to find not just an abstract, but the piece in its entirety.
In comparison to the press release, the study itself is far more objective, though to my untrained eye it still overlooks some major factors. The self-reported increase in depression and anxiety over the course of 6 months, according to the text, only “approaches significance.” Mathematically speaking, it’s not much beyond the margin of confidence. That is not a definitive result.
The study states that unlike girls, boys can share their problems endlessly without only positive results, an increase in strong friendship levels which are considered a positive sign of adjustment and mental health. Only girls can “talk too much.” Note the connection to the press release headline. Girls “complain,” a negative value judgment.
No mention is made in the study of the subjects the girls talk about with their friends, let alone boys and parties. Likewise, nothing in the study shows any benefit to distracting activities; that theory is not tested at all. As for taking their minds off things they can’t control, this is the single most glaring failing to me in the study.
Adolescent girls can have very real worries, and a lot of the things that impact them are outside their control, such as problems in the home like substance abuse or violence. To ignore this is to trivialize their experiences.
A related factor is the percentage of girls who would struggle with depression and anxiety even with no best friend to talk to. That could indeed be even higher than the number self-reporting those symptoms at the end of the study. If so, talking out their problems with friends could actually decrease the incidence of anxiety and depression. But we’ll never know, because the study ignores this factor.
Ms. Rose may well have identified a major trend in mental health, but given that the study only ran 6 months and contained only 2 datapoints, it’s hard to say. In my opinion, there’s not enough here to back up the press release, and certainly not enough to draw any firm conclusions on helping teenaged girls. But that wouldn’t have been press-worthy, now would it?
Think data mining cookies and stealth adware are a pain in the ass? Just wait until Microsoft gets this patent approved. No longer will your web browsing habits be the sole focus of marketers; with this “advertising framework” they’ll be able to search your hard drive for “contextual data tags” and display ads inside your applications, like your word processor or email client.
From the patent application:
Advertising services architecture
Abstract
An advertising framework registers context data sources and advertising display clients from a variety of resources on a local computer. The ad framework may then receive context data and display triggers from the registered context data sources. The context data and display triggers may be processed and an advertising request generated and sent to an external advertising source. Non-advertising content may also be supported. When a targeted advertisement is received in response, a display manager may send the ad to an appropriate display client. When the ad has been presented a the advertising framework will communicate to the advertising supplier who may apportion and credit advertising revenue to the participating parties.
In more understandable terms, from Ars Technica:
The application, filed in 2006, describes a multi-faceted, robust ad-delivering system that lives on a “user computer, whether it’s part of the OS, an application or integrated within applications.”
“Applications, tools, or utilities may use an application program interface to report context data tags such as key words or other information that may be used to target advertisements,” says the filing. “The advertising framework may host several components for receiving and processing the context data, refining the data, requesting advertisements from an advertising supplier, for receiving and forwarding advertisements to a display client for presentation, and for providing data back to the advertising supplier.”
The adware framework would leave almost no data untouched in its quest to sell you stuff. It would inspect “user document files, user e-mail files, user music files, downloaded podcasts, computer settings, computer status messages (e.g., a low memory status or low printer ink),” and more. How could we have been so blind as to not see the marketing value in computer status messages?
Read that carefully. “Part of the OS.” That means they could build it right into Windows. You can damn well bet they won’t be giving you a discount for sucking up your resources and violating your privacy, either. Whether a user could track it down and uninstall it is up in the air, too. After all, it has value to the user in “the perception that the ads are more relevant, and therefore, less of an interruption.” But even more important is the value to the advertiser, ie, the one giving them money. They gain “better focus and a higher chance of conversion to a sale.” All that, and it phones home, too.
Since you can’t patent an idea, this has to be more than vaporware. And if they know how to do something, do you really think they won’t?
Linux is looking better all the time.
What if the association between traumatic memories and fear could be broken? What if panic attacks could be short circuited before they begin? That’s the potential of research done by Li-Huei Tsai and colleagues, published in Nature Neuroscience (abstract), detailing how the cdk5 enzyme is elevated in mice exhibiting situational fear. Suppressing that enzyme appears to eliminate the learned fear reaction. Should the same hold true in humans, the implications are huge; PTSD and panic attacks could potentially be greatly reduced, or even perhaps completely eliminated.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder affects approximately 5.2 million people. Those numbers are probably going up, thanks to the stress and trauma brought on by war.
Via Seattle PI.
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