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Weiye Loh

11.01.97 - Misconceptions about the causes of cancer lead to skewed priorities and wast... - 0 views

berkeley.edu/...11_01_97a.html

Pollution Cancer Policy Science Risk

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • One of the big misconceptions is that artificial chemicals such as pesticides have a lot to do with human cancer, but that's just not true," says Bruce N. Ames, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of a new review of what is known about environmental pollution and cancer. "Nevertheless, it's conventional wisdom and society spends billions on this each year." "We consume more carcinogens in one cup of coffee than we get from the pesticide residues on all the fruits and vegetables we eat in a year," he adds.
  • there may be many excellent reasons for cleaning up pollution of our air, water and soil, the researchers say, prevention of cancer is not one of them.
  • "The problem is that lifestyle changes are tough," says Gold, director of the Carcinogenic Potency Project at UC Berkeley's National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences Center and a senior scientist in the cell and molecular biology division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "But by targeting pesticide residues as a major problem, we risk making fruits and vegetables more expensive and indirectly increasing cancer risks, especially among the poor."
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  • Whereas 99.9 percent of all the chemicals we ingest are natural, 78 percent of the chemicals tested are synthetic. So when more than half of all synthetic chemicals are found to cause cancer in rodents, it's not surprising that people link cancer with synthetic chemicals. But of the natural chemicals in our diet that have been tested in animals, half also cause cancer, Gold says.
  • "We need to recognize that there are far more carcinogens in the natural world than in the synthetic world, and go after the important things, such as lifestyle change."
  • Misconception: Cancer rates are soaring. In fact, the researchers say, if lung cancer due to smoking is excluded, overall cancer deaths in the U.S. have declined 16 percent since 1950.
  • Misconception: Reducing pesticide residues is an effective way to prevent diet-related cancer. Because fruits and vegetables are of major importance in reducing cancer, the unintended effect of requiring expensive efforts to reduce the amount of pesticides remaining on fruits and vegetables will be to increase their cost. This will lead to an increase in cancer among low income people who no longer will be able to afford to eat them.
  • Misconception: Human exposures to carcinogens and other potential hazards are primarily due to synthetic chemicals. Americans actually eat about 10,000 times more natural pesticides from fruits and vegetables than synthetic pesticide residues on food. Natural pesticides are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves against fungi, insects, and other predators. And half of all natural pesticides tested in rodents turn out to be rodent carcinogens. In addition, we consume many other carcinogens in foods because of the chemicals produced in cooking. In a single cup of roasted coffee, for example, the natural chemicals known to be rodent carcinogens are about equal in weight to an entire year's work of synthetic pesticide residues.
  • Misconception: Cancer risks to humans can be assessed by standard high-dose animal cancer tests. In cancer tests, animals are given very high, nearly toxic doses. The effect on humans at lower doses is extrapolated from these results, as if the relationship were a straight line from high dose to low dose. However, the fact that half of all chemicals tested, whether natural or synthetic, turn out to cause cancer in rodents implies that this is an artifact of using high doses. High doses of any chemical can chronically kill cells and wound tissue, a risk factor for cancer . "Our conclusion is that the scientific evidence shows that there are high-dose effects," Ames says. "But even though government regulatory agencies recognize this, they still decide which synthetic chemicals to regulate based on linear extrapolation of high dose cancer tests in animals."
  • Misconception: Synthetic chemicals pose greater carcinogenic hazards than natural chemicals. Naturally occurring carcinogens represent an enormous background compared to the low-dose exposures to residues of synthetic chemicals such as pesticides, the researchers conclude. These results call for a reevaluation of whether animal cancer tests are really useful guides for protecting the public against minor hypothetical risks.
  • Misconception: The toxicology of synthetic chemicals is different from that of natural chemicals. No evidence exists for this, but the assumption could lead to unfortunate tradeoffs between natural and synthetic pesticides. Recently, for example, when a new variety of highly insect-resistant celery was introduced on a farm, the workers handling the celery developed rashes when they were exposed to sunlight. The pest-resistant celery turned out to contain almost eight times more natural pesticide in the form of psoralens -- chemicals known to cause cancer and genetic mutations -- than common celery.
  • Misconception: Pesticides and other synthetic chemicals are disrupting human hormones. Claims that synthetic chemicals with hormonal activity contribute to cancer and reduced sperm count ignore the fact that natural chemicals have hormone-like activity millions of times greater than do traces of synthetic chemicals. Rather, lifestyle -- lack of exercise, obesity, alcohol use and reproductive history -- are known to lead to marked changes in hormone levels in the body.
  • Misconception: Regulating low, hypothetical risks advances public health. Society -- primarily the private sector -- will spend an estimated $140 billion to comply with environmental regulations this year, according to projections by the Environmental Protection Agency. Much of this is aimed at reducing low-level human exposure to chemicals solely because they are rodent carcinogens, despite the fact that this rationale is flawed. Our improved ability to detect even minuscule concentrations of chemicals makes regulation even more expensive.
  • Weiye Loh on 09 Apr 11
     
    BERKELEY -- Despite a lack of convincing evidence that pollution is an important cause of human cancer, this misconception drives government policy today and results in billions of dollars spent to clean up minuscule amounts of synthetic chemicals, say two UC Berkeley researchers.
Weiye Loh

If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...as-can-talk-should-we-eat-them

Plants Ethics Food Communications Diet

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • growing fields of plant intelligence studies and neurobotany
  • . Is it morally permissible to submit to total instrumentalization living beings that, though they do not have a central nervous system, are capable of basic learning and communication? Should their swift response to stress leave us coldly indifferent, while animal suffering provokes intense feelings of pity and compassion?
  • When it comes to a plant, it turns out to be not only a what but also a who — an agent in its milieu, with its own intrinsic value or version of the good. Inquiring into justifications for consuming vegetal beings thus reconceived, we reach one of the final frontiers of dietary ethics.
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  • the subjectivity of plants is not centered in a single organ or function but is dispersed throughout their bodies, from the roots to the leaves and shoots. Nevertheless, this dispersion of vitality holds out a promise of its own: the plasticity of plants and their wondrous capacity for regeneration, their growth by increments, quantitative additions or reiterations of already existing parts does little to change the form of living beings that are neither parts nor wholes because they are not hierarchically structured organisms. The “renewable” aspects of perennial plants may be accepted by humans as a gift of vegetal being and integrated into their diets.
  • The desire to eat ethically is, perhaps, akin to this royal sensitivity, as some would argue that it is a luxury of those who do have enough food to select, in a conscious manner, their dietary patterns.
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Apr 12
     
    a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants, with which it shared its soil. In other words, through the roots, it relayed to its neighbors the biochemical message about the onset of drought, prompting them to react as though they, too, were in a similar predicament. Curiously, having received the signal, plants not directly affected by this particular environmental stress factor were better able to withstand adverse conditions when they actually occurred. This means that the recipients of biochemical communication could draw on their "memories" - information stored at the cellular level - to activate appropriate defenses and adaptive responses when the need arose.
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: Double podcast teaser! Vegetarianism and the relationship between ... - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...-teaser-vegetarianism-and.html

Ethics Vegetarianism Science Value

shared by Weiye Loh on 03 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Vegetarianism: is it a good idea? Vegetarianism is a complex set of beliefs and practices, spanning from the extreme “fruitarianism,” where people only eat fruits and other plant parts that can be gathered without “harming” the plant (though I’m sure the plant would rather keep its fruits and use them for the evolutionary purpose of dispersing its own offspring) to various forms of “flexitaranism,” like pollotarianism (poultry is okay to eat) and pescetarianism (fisk okay).
  • Is it true that a vegetarian diet increases one’s health? Yes, but only in certain respects, partially because vegetarians also tend to be health conscious in general (they exercise, don’t smoke, drink less, etc.), and it is not the case for the more extreme versions (including veganism), where one needs to be extremely careful to achieve a balanced diet which may need to be supplemented artificially, especially for growing children.
  • What is the ethical case for vegetarianism? Again, the answer is complex. It seems hard to logically defend fruitarianism, and borderline to make a moral argument for veganism, but broader forms of vegetarianism certainly get at important issues of suffering and mistreatment of both animals and industry workers, not to mention that the environmental impact of meat eating is much more damaging than that of vegetarianism. And so the debate rages on.
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  • Value-free science? Many scientists think that science is about objectivity and “just the facts, ma’am.” Not so fast, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science have argued now for a number of decades. While I certainly have no sympathy for the extreme postmodernist position exemplified by the so-called “strong programme” in sociology of science — that science is entirely the result of social construction — there are several interesting and delicate facets of the problem to explore.
  • there are values embedded in the practice of science itself: testability, accuracy, generality, simplicity, and the like. Needless to say, few if any of these can be justified within science itself — there is no experiment confirming Occam’s razor, for instance.
  • Then there are the many moral dimensions of science practice, both in terms of ethical issues internal to science (fraud) and of the much broader ones affecting society at large (societal consequences of research and technological advances).
  • There is also the issue of diversity in science. Until very recently, and in many fields still today, science has largely been an affair conducted by white males. And this has historically resulted in a large amount of nonsense — say about gender differences, or ethnic differences — put forth as objective knowledge and accepted by the public because it has the imprimatur of science. But, you might say, that was the past, now we have corrected the errors and moved on. Except that such an argument ignores the fact that there is little reason to think that only we have gotten it just right, that the current generation is somehow immune from an otherwise uninterrupted history of science-based blunders.
  • Regarding Occam's Razor, there is a justification for it based on probability theory, see:http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/01/12/occams-razor-bayes-theorem/http://telescoper.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/bayes-razor/http://www.stat.duke.edu/~berger/papers/ockham.html
  • another interesting dimension of the relationship between values and science concerns which scientific questions we should pursue (and, often, fund with public money). Scientists often act as they ought to be the only arbiters here, and talk as if some questions were “obviously” intrinsically important. But when your research is costly and paid for by the public, perhaps society deserves a bit more of an explanation concerning why millions of dollars ought to be spent on obscure problems that apparently interest only a handful of university professors concentrated in one or a few countries.
Weiye Loh

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond | Philosophy Now - 0 views

www.philosophynow.org/...th_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

Postmodernism Foucault Philosophy Modernism Spectacle Reality Reality TV

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.
  • somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.
  • Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).
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  • Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items. The terminology of ‘interactivity’ is equally inappropriate here, since there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writes a segment of the programme – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player.
  • The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again. This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product. Internet pages are not ‘authored’ in the sense that anyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the individual to make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can easily make up pages yourself (eg blogs).
  • Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace.
  • Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV (yet another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money.
  • The purely ‘spectacular’ function of television, as with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the busy, active, forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its instability. It is made up by the ‘viewer’, if not in its content then in its sequence – you wouldn’t read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might well, and justifiably, read Ceefax that way.
  • A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity.
  • If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state.
  • The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal
  • Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters.
  • A triteness, a shallowness dominates all.
  • In music, the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.
  • To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them.
  • Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by displaying individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock.
  • whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety
  • pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent.
  • Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble.
  • pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Apr 12
     
    Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we're going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift - and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.
Weiye Loh

Bad Health Habits Blamed on Genetics - Newsweek - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/...avior-blamed-on-wonky-dna.html

Habits Genetic Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jun 10 - Cached
  • A new study shows just how alluring “My DNA did it!” is to some people.
  • here are serious scientific concerns about the reliability and value of many of the genes linked to disease. And now we have another reason why the hype is worrisome: people who engage in the riskiest-for-health behaviors, and who therefore most need to change, are more likely to blame their genes for their diseases, finds a new study published online in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
  • Worse, the more behavioral risk factors people have—smoking and eating a high-fat diet and not exercising, for instance—the less likely they are to be interested in information about living healthier.
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  • The unhealthier people’s habits were, the more they latched on to genetic explanations for diseases
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Jun 10
     
    My Alleles Made Me Do It: The Folly of Blaming Bad Behavior on Wonky DNA
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Nash Equilibrium, the Omerta Rule, and Doping in Cycling - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...doping-in-cycling

Doping Athletic Competition Nash Equilibrium Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Forget about trying to catch doping. It’s a game the “good guys” can never win. Stop testing at all, and declare open season. Treat doping as just something else that the sportsmen can do to improve their performance, much the same as spending money on a good bike isn’t considered cheating.
  • Curious on what motivates you to draw the line of acceptability after a vigorous diet and exercise regime, nutritional supplements, a pro trainer, and other measures specifically designed to manipulate the body for enhanced athletic performance, but before PEDs.
  • Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 10
     
    NASH EQUILIBRIUM, THE OMERTA RULE, AND DOPING IN CYCLING
Weiye Loh

Singapore M.D.: Whose "health" is it anyway? - 0 views

singaporemd.blogspot.com/...whose-health-is-it-anyway.html

Health Statistics

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jul 10 - Cached
  • leaving aside the fact that from the figures given by Prof Feng, about 80 per cent of obese people are NOT "perfectly healthy with normal cholesterol and blood sugar", and 70 per cent of people who die suddenly of heart attacks ARE obese (see my take on the 'fat but fit' argument here), and that Prof Feng has written in a previous letter of obesity being "a serious medical problem and [that] studies in the United States show that obesity will be the No. 1 public health problem and cause of death in five years' time", I am amused by Prof Feng's definition of good health as "not a number... [but] a sense of well-being physically, mentally, socially and spiritually".
  • much of what we do in "medicine" today is about numbers. Your "weight, body mass index, how often you jog or the number of kilometres you run", your "cholesterol and blood sugar", your smoking, alcohol intake, exercise, sexual behaviour, diet and family history are all quantified and studied, because they give us an idea of your risk for certain diseases. Our interventions, pharmacological or otherwise, aim to modify or reduce these risks. These are numbers that translate to concrete events in real-life.You may argue that one can have bad risk factors and still have a sense of "physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being", in which case you don't need a doctor or drugs to make you feel better - but that doesn't mean you are not going to die of a heart attack at 40 either.
  • The problem with using the term "well-being" in defining something as important as healthcare or medicine, is that it is a vague term (a weasel word, I like to call it) that allows quacks to ply their trade, and for people to medicalise their problems of living - and that is something Prof Feng disapproved of, isn't it?Do I have a better definition for "health"? Well, not yet - but I certainly don't think my job is only about giving people "a sense of well-being".
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Jul 10
     
    Whose "health" is it anyway? Friday, July 30, 2010 Posted by admin at 12:37 PM | The problem with us doctors is, we can't quite make up our minds on what constitute "health" or "real medicine".
Weiye Loh

Our conflicted relationship with animals - Pets. Animals. - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

Vegetarianism Animal Rights

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • In his fascinating new book, "Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat," Hal Herzog looks at the wild, tortured paradoxes in our relationship with the weaker, if sometimes more adorable, species.
  • it's the human-meat relationship. The fact is, very few people are vegetarians; even most vegetarians eat meat. There have been several studies, including a very large one by the Department of Agriculture, where they asked people one day: Describe your diet. And 5 percent said they were vegetarians. Well, then they called the same people back a couple of days later and asked them about what they ate in the last 24 hours. And over 60 percent of these vegetarians had eaten meat. And so, the fact is, the campaign for moralized meat has been a failure. We actually kill three times as many animals for their flesh as we did when Peter Singer wrote "Animal Liberation" [in 1975]. We eat probably 20 percent more meat than we did when he wrote that book. Even though people are more concerned about animals, it seems like that's been occurring. The question is, why?
  • What was it about the two giant viral videos of the past few weeks -- the London woman, Mary Bale, who tried to trash that cat; the Bosnian woman who threw puppies from a bridge
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  • The bigger thing is they're both pet species, though. I've been thinking about this. I just went back this morning, and I uncovered a piece in the New York Times from 1877. And it's actually fascinating. They had a stray dog population, so what they did is they rounded up 750 stray dogs. They took them to the East River, and they had a large metal cage -- it took them all day to do this -- they would put 50 dogs at a time, 48 dogs at a time in this metal, iron cage, and lower it into the East River with a crane.
  • they both involved women. And this is a little bit of an anomaly, because if you look at animal cruelty trials and (data), I think it's that 90 to 95 percent are men behind them. So that's one reason why this went viral; it's the surprising idea of women being cruel in this way.
  • drowning animals was actually an acceptable way of dealing with pet overpopulation in 1877. Now it seems horrifying. I watched that girl toss those puppies into the river, and it was just horrifying.
  • rooster fighters had a fairly intricate set of moral logical framework in which cockfighting not only becomes not bad, it becomes actually good for the moral model for your children, something to be desired.
  • the most common rationale is the same one that you hear from chicken eaters: It's natural. It's really funny, I was telling a woman one time about these cockfighters, and she was telling me how disgusting it was and somehow it came around to eating chicken. I said, "Whoa, you eat chicken, how do you feel about that?" and she said, "Well, that's different because that's natural." That's exactly what the rooster fighters told me.
  • the cockfighters take good care of them, as opposed to the chicken we eat, which usually live very short, very miserable lives.
  • the fact is, there is actually less harm done by rooster fighting than there is by eating chicken.
  • There's a number of people that are bitten by pets every year. There's a shocking number of people that trip over their pet and wind up in the hospital. There's the fact that pets are the biggest source of conflict between neighbors
  • Weiye Loh on 08 Sep 10
     
    Our conflicted relationship with animals Why do we get so angry with animal abusers, but eat more animals than ever before? An expert provides some clues
Weiye Loh

The Data-Driven Life - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...02self-measurement-t.html

Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention.
  • These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut.
  • Others use data.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Others use data. A timer running on Robin Barooah’s computer tells him that he has been living in the United States for 8 years, 2 months and 10 days. At various times in his life, Barooah — a 38-year-old self-employed software designer from England who now lives in Oakland, Calif. — has also made careful records of his work, his sleep and his diet.
  • A few months ago, Barooah began to wean himself from coffee. His method was precise. He made a large cup of coffee and removed 20 milliliters weekly. This went on for more than four months, until barely a sip remained in the cup. He drank it and called himself cured. Unlike his previous attempts to quit, this time there were no headaches, no extreme cravings. Still, he was tempted, and on Oct. 12 last year, while distracted at his desk, he told himself that he could probably concentrate better if he had a cup. Coffee may have been bad for his health, he thought, but perhaps it was good for his concentration. Barooah wasn’t about to try to answer a question like this with guesswork. He had a good data set that showed how many minutes he spent each day in focused work. With this, he could do an objective analysis. Barooah made a chart with dates on the bottom and his work time along the side. Running down the middle was a big black line labeled “Stopped drinking coffee.” On the left side of the line, low spikes and narrow columns. On the right side, high spikes and thick columns. The data had delivered their verdict, and coffee lost.
  • “People have such very poor sense of time,” Barooah says, and without good time calibration, it is much harder to see the consequences of your actions. If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them.
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: Some animals are more equal than others - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...re-more-equal-than-others.html

Animal Rights Morality Vegetarianism Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • society's answer to the question “Is it acceptable to hurt animals for our pleasure?” isn't always “No.” Odds are that most of the people who objected to the dog fighting and crush videos are frequent consumers of meat, milk, and eggs from industrialized farms. And the life of an animal in a typical industrialized farm is notoriously punishing. Many spend their lives in cages so confining they can barely move; ammonia fumes burn their eyes; their beaks or tails are chopped off to prevent them from biting each other out of stress; and the farm's conditions make many of them so sick or weak that they die in their cages or on the way to slaughter. As a society, however, we apparently believe that the pleasure we get from eating those animals makes their suffering worth it.
  • many people will object that eating animals isn’t a matter of pleasure at all, but of the need for sustenance. While that may have been true for our ancestors who survived by hunting wild animals, I don’t think it has much relevance to our current situation. First, it's questionable whether we actually do need to eat animal products in order to be healthy; the American Dietetic Association has given the thumbs up to vegetarian and even vegan diets. But even if you believe that some amount of animal product consumption is medically necessary, we could still buy from farms that raise their livestock much more humanely. It would cost more, but we could always compensate by cutting back on other luxuries, or simply by eating less meat. By any reasonable estimate, Americans could cut their meat consumption drastically with no ill effects on their health (and likely with many positive effects). Buying the sheer amount of meat that Americans do, at the low prices made possible by industrialized farms, is a luxury that can’t be defended with a “need for sustenance” argument. It’s about pleasure — the pleasure of eating more meat than strictly necessary for health, and the pleasure of saving money that can then be spent on other things we enjoy.
  • there are several reasons why people regard consumers of industrial farming differently than consumers of crush videos and dogfighting. The first has to do with the types of animals involved: pigs, cows, and chickens simply aren't as cute as dogs, bunnies, and kittens. I don't know how many people would explicitly cite that as the reason they're willing to inflict suffering on the former and not the latter, but it seems to play a role, even if people won't admit as much. People who have no qualms about a pig spending its life in a small, dark crate would nevertheless be outraged if a dog were treated in the same way.
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  • Cuteness is a pretty silly criterion by which to assign moral status, though. It's not as if unappealing animals are less intelligent or less sensitive to pain.
  • And if you have any trouble seeing the absurdity of basing moral judgments on cuteness, it helps to try out the principle in other contexts. (Is it worse to abuse a cute child than an ugly one?)
  • But I think the biggest reason that different examples of hurting animals for pleasure elicit different reactions from people is not about the types of animals involved, but about the types of pleasure.
  • One objective difference people might cite is the fact that a desire to eat meat is “natural” while a desire to watch kittens being crushed is not. Which is true, in the sense that our species did evolve to eat meat while a fetish for crushing kittens is an aberration. But using naturalness as a criterion for moral rightness is a dubious move. First, it seems rather arbitrary, from a logical perspective, which is why it's often referred to as the naturalistic fallacy. And second, it would justify some pretty unsavory “natural” urges, like rape and tribalism, while prohibiting other “unnatural” urges, like the desire to wear clothing or to refrain from having children.
  • The closest thing that I can find to a morally relevant distinction between industrial farming, dogfighting, and crush videos is this: While it’s true that all three acts cause animal suffering in order to give people pleasure, the nature of that tradeoff differs. The consumers of crush videos and dogfighting are taking pleasure in the suffering itself, whereas the consumers of industrially-farmed meat are taking pleasure in the meat that was produced by the suffering. From a purely harm-based perspective, the moral calculus is the same: the animal suffers so that you can experience pleasure. But the degree of directness of that tradeoff makes a difference in how we perceive your character. Someone whose motive is “I enjoy seeing another creature suffer” seems more evil than someone whose motive is “I want a tasty meal,” even if both people cause the same amount of suffering.
  • And I can certainly understand why people would want to call a crush video enthusiast more “evil” than a person who buys meat from industrial farms, because of the difference in their motivations. That's a reasonable way to define evilness. But in that case we're left with the fact that a person's evilness may be totally unrelated to the amount of harm she causes; and that, in fact, some of the greatest harm may be caused by people whose motivations seem unobjectionable to us. Apathy, denial, conformity; none of these inspire the same outrage as sadism, but they've caused some pretty horrible outcomes. And if you believe that it's wrong to make animals suffer for our pleasure, but you reserve your moral condemnation only for cases that viscerally upset you, like dogfighting or crush videos, then you're falling prey to the trap that Isaac Asimov famously warned us against: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
Weiye Loh

The secret to a long life isn't what you think - USATODAY.com - 0 views

yourlife.usatoday.com/...1

Longevity Health Academic Research

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Researchers Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin report their conclusions in a new book, The Longevity Project. "Everybody has the ideas — don't stress, don't worry, don't work so hard, retire and go play golf," says Friedman, a psychology professor at University of California-Riverside. "We did not find these patterns to exist in people who thrived."
  • At the core of their 20 years of research is a study started by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921. Terman died in 1956, but other researchers carried on the study. One participant was biologist Ancel Keys, whose life-long work helped popularize the Mediterranean diet. He died in 2004 at age 100. He enjoyed gardening as an activity much of his life.
  • if your activities rise or stay high in middle age, you definitely stay healthier and live longer," says Martin, a research psychologist at University of California-Riverside.
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  • The participants who lived long, happy lives "were not cynical rebels and loners" but accomplished people who were satisfied with their lives. Many knew that worrying is sometimes a good thing. The authors also looked at a study of Medicare patients that found that "neuroticism was health-protective."
  • spending 30 minutes at least four times a week expending energy at a moderate to intense level is "good up-to-date medical advice but poor practical advice."
  • Being active in middle age was most important to health and longevity in the study. But rather than vow to do something to get in shape (like jogging) and then hate it and not stick with it, find something you like to do."We looked at those who stayed active," Friedman says. "It wasn't the kids on sports teams. It's the ones who had activities at one point and had the pattern of keeping them ... They were doing stuff that got them out of the chair ... whether it was gardening, walking the dog or going to museums."
  • One of the best childhood personality predictors of longevity was conscientiousness — "qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person, like a scientist or professor — somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree,"
  • the most obvious reason "is that conscientious people do more things to protect their health and engage in fewer activities that are risky."
  • "What characterized the people who thrived is a combination of their own persistence and dependability and the help of other people," Friedman says. The young adults who were thrifty, persistent, detail-oriented and responsible lived the longest.
  • Those with the most career success were the least likely to die young. Those who moved from job to job without a clear progression were less likely to have long lives than those with increasing responsibilities.
  • "continually productive men and women lived much longer than the laid-back comrades. ... This production orientation mattered more than their social relationships or their sense of happiness or well-being."
  • those who were most engaged in pursuing their goals.
  • a sexually satisfying and happy marriage is a very good indicator of future health and long life," but being single for a woman can be just as healthy as being in a marriage, especially if she has other fulfilling social relationships.
  • The married men in the study lived the longest. Single men outlived remarried men but didn't live as long as married men. Among women, the number who divorced their husbands and stayed single lived nearly as long as steadily married women."Being divorced was much less harmful to a women's health," the authors say.
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Mar 11
     
    The idea that your job or your boss is leading you to an early grave is one of several myths debunked in an analysis of a 90-year study that followed 1,528 Americans. Among other myths: be optimistic, get married, go to church, eat broccoli and get a gym membership.
Weiye Loh

Have you heard of the Koch Brothers? | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=10234

News media bias Protest Violence Union

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • I return to the Guardian online site expressly to search for those elusive articles on Wisconsin. The main page has none. I click on News – US, and there are none. I click on ‘Commentary is Free’- US, and find one article on protests in Ohio. I go to the New York Times online site. Earlier, on my phone, I had seen one article at the bottom of the main page on Wisconsin. By the time I managed to get on my computer to find it again however, the NYT main page was quite devoid of any articles on the protests at all. I am stumped; clearly, I have to reconfigure my daily news sources and reading diet.
  • It is not that the media is not covering the protests in Wisconsin at all – but effective media coverage in the US at least, in my view, is as much about volume as it is about substantive coverage. That week, more prime-time slots and the bulk of the US national attention were given to Charlie Sheen and his crazy antics (whatever they were about, I am still not too sure) than to Libya and the rest of the Middle East, or more significantly, to a pertinent domestic issue, the teacher protests  - not just in Wisconsin but also in other cities in the north-eastern part of the US.
  • In the March 2nd episode of The Colbert Report, it was shown that the Fox News coverage of the Wisconsin protests had re-used footage from more violent protests in California (the palm trees in the background gave Fox News away). Bill O’Reilly at Fox News had apparently issued an apology – but how many viewers who had seen the footage and believed it to be on-the-ground footage of Wisconsin would have followed-up on the report and the apology? And anyway, why portray the teacher protests as violent?
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  • In this New York Times’ article, “Teachers Wonder, Why the scorn?“, the writer notes the often scathing comments from counter-demonstrators – “Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.” What had begun as an ostensibly ‘economic reform’ targeted at teachers’ unions has gradually transmogrified into a kind of “character attack” to this section of American society – teachers are people who wage violent protests (thanks to borrowed footage from the West Coast) and they are undeserving of their economic benefits, and indeed treat these privileges as ‘rights’. The ‘war’ is waged on multiple fronts, economic, political, social, psychological even — or at least one gets this sort of picture from reading these articles.
  • as Singaporeans with a uniquely Singaporean work ethic, we may perceive functioning ‘trade unions’ as those institutions in the so-called “West” where they amass lots of membership, then hold the government ‘hostage’ in order to negotiate higher wages and benefits. Think of trade unions in the Singaporean context, and I think of SIA pilots. And of LKY’s various firm and stern comments on those issues. Think of trade unions and I think of strikes in France, in South Korea, when I was younger, and of my mum saying, “How irresponsible!” before flipping the TV channel.
  • The reason why I think the teachers’ protests should not be seen solely as an issue about trade-unions, and evaluated myopically and naively in terms of whether trade unions are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is because the protests feature in a larger political context with the billionaire Koch brothers at the helm, financing and directing much of what has transpired in recent weeks. Or at least according to certain articles which I present here.
  • In this NYT article entitled “Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute“, the writer noted that Koch Industries had been “one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.” Further, the president of Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit group financed by the Koch brothers, had reportedly addressed counter-demonstrators last Saturday saying that “the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits.” and in his own words -“ ‘We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation’ ”. All this rhetoric would be more convincing to me if they weren’t funded by the same two billionaires who financially enabled Walker’s governorship.
  • I now refer you to a long piece by Jane Mayer for The New Yorker titled, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama“. According to her, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.”
  • Their libertarian modus operandi involves great expenses in lobbying, in political contributions and in setting up think tanks. From 2006-2010, Koch Industries have led energy companies in political contributions; “[i]n the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation.” More statistics, or at least those of the non-anonymous donation records, can be found on page 5 of Mayer’s piece.
  • Naturally, the Democrats also have their billionaire donors, most notably in the form of George Soros. Mayer writes that he has made ‘generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s.” Yet what distinguishes him from the Koch brothers here is, as Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued, ‘that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” ‘ Of course, this must be taken with a healthy dose of salt, but I will note here that in Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job, which was about the 2008 financial crisis, George Soros was one of those interviewed who was not portrayed negatively. (My review of it is here.)
  • Of the Koch brothers’ political investments, what interested me more was the US’ “first libertarian thinktank”, the Cato Institute. Mayer writes, ‘When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told [Mayer] that “global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy.” ‘
  • K Street refers to a major street in Washington, D.C. where major think tanks, lobbyists and advocacy groups are located.
  • with recent developments as the Citizens United case where corporations are now ‘persons’ and have no caps in political contributions, the Koch brothers are ever better-positioned to take down their perceived big, bad government and carry out their ideological agenda as sketched in Mayer’s piece
  • with much important news around the world jostling for our attention – earthquake in Japan, Middle East revolutions – the passing of an anti-union bill (which finally happened today, for better or for worse) in an American state is unlikely to make a headline able to compete with natural disasters and revolutions. Then, to quote Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during that prank call conversation, “Sooner or later the media stops finding it [the teacher protests] interesting.”
  • What remains more puzzling for me is why the American public seems to buy into the Koch-funded libertarian rhetoric. Mayer writes, ‘ “Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist.” I suppose that not knowing who is funding the political rhetoric makes it easier for the public to imbibe it.
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