The Radical Journal of Psychcology has just published a series on the Survivor’s Voice and a lot of news continues to develop on the Eli Lily/freedom of speech case

Wathching this video I was reminded that the image can quite often trump the power of the written word. Made by anthropologist Michael Wesh, I could not help but smile at his visual essay on the web, even though I am not all that rah-rah over Web 2.0 and the unbelievable proliferation of …. everything …. . But I immediately identified with most of the images and so there was something quite comforting in seeing a set of images that if nothing else, captures the everyday experiences of many folks hunched over their computers for hours everyday.

I think it would have been good, however, to include at least a small splash of the dysptopic in this representation, because even for its biggest enthusiasts, I imagine there is always a set of frustrations and downsides, like for example, taking over 3 weeks to catch up with your blogroll (and mine is pretty modest) because of this extreme explosion of well … everything… and all the organzing tools like tagging and citation software while are really “cool” in that gadget-gizmo sense are just not enough to soften the downsides of a really heavy (information-over) load.

Are psychiatry and big pharma joined at the hips ? And if yes is this a bad thing?

In a recent speech, the new president of the APA sees the relationship as a little too cozy for comfort: “We have allowed ourselves to be corrupted in this marketplace with lucrative consulting to industry, speaker panels, boards of directors, and visits from industry representatives bearing gifts.”

Some industry representatives and psychiatrists were not moved and responded with their assessment statement:

Unless another model is proposed and shown to be effective, we believe that the strong partnerships and collective contributions of academic, clinical, and industry-employed psychiatrists and neuroscience researchers can best maximize our potential to deliver the highest quality of psychiatric care to all who suffer from mental illness.

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It is nice to see the debate occuring within the field itself and I hope that it continues, especially with some hashing out of other models. And here is one of the most interesting ones in that it takes physical activity and cultural expectations quite seriously.

Technology and science are, at times, part of some solution. But once unleashed in the world, they can also perpetuate problems and act as barriers.

I just finished two articles that have addressed this conundrum in provocative ways and I recommend both to read just for the sake of reading as they are written stunningly well and if you teach a course related to science, technology, medicine and society, these two would make excellent introductions to the importance of critically dissecting science, technology, and medicine (and I think you could unpack them for hours and hours, which is very helpful if you are looking to fill up some time).

One, Happy Meal is by the author of the immensely popular Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan. In the article he starts with the simple suggestion of trashing most fast/junk/processed food in favor of whole foods, notably plants. But then he delves into the much more complicated topic of the science of nutrition, making a pretty sharp critique of the field, especially for 1) its reductionism 2) and the ways in which the food industry mobilizes nutrition data it is favor and often to the detriment of furthering the goals of real nutrition.

After I posted the link on an IRC Debian channel, I had a pretty heated conversation with a number of Debian developers about the nature of science and how one goes about critique it (and mobilizing data to make counter-claims). As often is the case, we ended up arguing over the merit of his attack (though everyone agreed that his food suggestions were quite sound, and I find this disjuncture pretty interesting), as some felt like his attack on the science of nutrition went too far. I did not feel like his article was anti-science or alarmist but saw it as attacking a particular configuration of nutrition science (the reductionism, the inability to admit more complexity, and the turning away from common sense principles), which carry with it serious consequences in the so-called real world. He offers a critical edge that I think does not attack the principle of science generally (after all, he is using the techniques of skepticism and he marshals plenty of scientific data, like studies on omega 3s and 6 to make his point, though he does not only employ the rhetoric of science, which I think is key to understand his critique too) but just what is sees as a particularly problematic rendition of it that is especially problematic for nutrition (though I am sure many of his critiques are easily transfered to other domains).

Here, for example, is an attack on reductionism:

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

And muses on the effects of this narrow path:

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

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But you will see here that he reaches into scientific facts so that he is not throwing out the bathwater with the baby:

(more…)

It is weird when spam arrives in your folder with a free speech self-justification:

Name: nude girls | E-mail: jenna@haze.com | URI: http://nudefreexxx.com/ | IP: 195.175.37.6

“Spam e-mails should be, should not be outlawed – Or: can, can not be outlawed, are examples of persuasive speech topic variants.”

I am not a big watcher of T.V. (though I do manage to get my fix of the daily show, colbert, and more recently heroes, thanks to the good ol’ internet) but i am a big fan of good commercials. Because a good commerical is, let’s face it, hard to pull off. You have like less than a minute to say something and more important, have it be memorable; and that is why 98% of ads are creative disasters. But I really appreciate the other 2% and try to see the movie that displays all the best ads of the year, which I did this past weekend.

And my favorite of them (that I can find on the internet anway, in less than five minutes) is Big Ad because it is so meta and so riding/riffing off the popularity of the LOTR aesthetic… (there was an especially wacky and wonderful Thai one, in 3 parts, for a face cream cleanser, but I cannot find it…)

Thankfully I don’t have to directly deal with the Wikipedia question till next fall when I am teaching a bunch of students but the debate is totally fascinating and the comments in this Inside Higher Ed article are quite provocative and thought-provoking (if not sometimes downright hialrious).

My Ubuntu-counterpart, Andreas Lloyd, has written a nice response to Lars Risan’s interesting discussion of tensions between Ubuntu and Debian and in it, he visits, with great detail (or as much as a blog post will allow), the limits of launchpad. It is exciting to see more anthropologists conducting in-depth research on F/OSS projects with a keen awareness of the ways technology mediate or make possible certain social relationships. . .

Hope this sticks in Thailand yet spreads to other nations struggling with exorbitant drug costs… Time will tell…

In the last few weeks the news, no really uproar, over Eli Lily’s suppression of data over Zyprexa, has in no way waned.

The EFF, thankfully, is on board, defending the rights of citizen-journalists to link to the Eli Lily documents and the New York Times continues with what is actually really impressive coverage and the news is making its way into other publications
(and here too.)

It now looks like (and I knew this would happen, it was just a matter of time) that state prosecutors are turning up the heat. Zyprexa is a priceeeeeeeeey drug, truly expensive, and since a lot of folks given the drug are on disability or medicaid, the state has been picking up the tab, so a few states, like Illinois and Vermont may be launching civil and criminal investigations, in part to recup their money.