Tag Archives: cogsci

On Sean Levert’s Horrific Death During Xanax Withdrawl

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A terrible story that should never have happened: Cleveland.com: Sean Levert, denied medication, hallucinated for hours before he died in jail:

R&B singer Sean Levert entered the Cuyahoga County Jail on March 24 clutching the prescribed medication he took regularly for anxiety.

Jail staff took the bottle of Xanax away from him and failed to give him a single pill during the six days he was there, investigators said. Even when he began suffering horrifying delusions, he wasn’t given his medication and never saw a doctor.

Instead, on March 30, jailers strapped Levert into a restraint chair, still fighting the monstrous visions in his head caused by withdrawal from the medication. Minutes later, the 39-year-old son of O’Jays star Eddie Levert stopped breathing. His heart then stopped and doctors couldn’t save him.

Metafilter: Xanax withdrawal isn’t pretty

Effort Counts

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Calvin Coolidge famously said: Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Seth Godin: Is effort a myth?

Overcoming Bias: Make an Extraordinary Effort

All we can do is play the cards we are dealt the best we can. And try to do so with every hand.

I love the smell of Web mobs in the morning

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It’s been an interesting week and a half in American politics, but today, the Web is going to take a special role, the blogosphere in particular, and in an a real ugly way.

There are pictures floating around of some MySpace pages, with titles and comments that are easily misunderstood not given appropriate context.

And based upon our biases we will automatically believe what we want to believe about them.

While we all take special delight in exposing hypocrisy, as we should as it reveals much about character, sometimes things go way, way too far. And I have a feeling this is about to.

We’re all flawed human beings and the sooner we each recognize that, and be understanding towards that, the better this world will be. From all sides of the political isle.

I think Obama’s speech last week was a bit of an inspiration. And this is an expression of that.

Social Media/Software Links for Today

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There’s a theme going on here that is a bit hard to place… but it’s there.

Jon Udell: Homophily, anti-recommendation, and Driveway Moments , shout out to Global Voices Online:

Recommendation systems don’t help me much. They only suggest things similar to other things I’ve shown interest in. Increasingly that just frustrates me. The most delightful recommendations are those that connect me with things that interest me in unpredictable ways. That happens serendipitously, and I haven’t yet found a reliable way to manufacture the serendipity.

Crooked Timber: Blogs, Participation and Polarization:

So whether you like political blogs will depend to some extent on whether you prefer deliberation across party lines to participation, or vice versa. Personally (at least as regards political efficacy in the current era), I’m on the vice versa side, but we leave this question deliberately open, as people from different perspectives may disagree &c &c.

NYTimes: via rc3.org: Undecideds More Decided Than They Think, Study Says:

Voters who insist that they are undecided about a contentious issue are sometimes fooling themselves, having already made a choice at a subconscious level, a new study suggests.

Wired: Presidential Election Already Decided … in Voters’ Minds:

The electorate has already made up its collective mind who it will vote for in November. Even many of those all-important and highly coveted undecided voters aren’t really undecided.

They may think they are carefully weighing their choices, but their decision is rigged in advance by their subconscious minds, say psychologists, and they just aren’t aware of it.

CJR: Echo Chamber: How blogging failed the war in Georgia:

There are, of course, many others. The point is not that some blogs covered the conflict well, and fulfilled the promise of a blog network that transcends the spin and amplifies ignored voices: it is that the majority of blogs did not. Watching the most prominent blogs turn into their own worst enemies largely deflates much of their egalitarian mystique–and drives home just how important it is to remain a skeptical reader.

Slate: What’s Really Killing Newspapers: Not that long ago, the daily newspaper was an indispensable coiner of social currency, and it gave its readers piles of the stuff in each edition.

Corante: Transforming American Newspapers (Part 2):

It is almost impossible to overstate how utterly the supply of news and information available to most Americans has changed during the past 35 years. Within a single generation, the Supply & Demand equation has gone from relative scarcity to certain surplus. People now have so much access to information that some are complaining about ‘data smog’.

Bubblegeneration: Data is a Commodity, or How Not to Revolutionize…:

This is an old question. We discussed it at USV Sessions two years ago – I think it was phrased, “What’s the value of data in an open world”. And even then, little insight was generated.

It’s the wrong question. Data isn’t the valuable.

In fact, data’s a commodity. We’re drowning in data.

Think about it this way: the lower the cost of interaction, by definition, the more abundant data is – because every interaction creates reams of data. More data is created tomorrow than was created yesterday. And so on.

What is valuable are the things that create data: markets, networks, and communities.

Chicago Tribune interviews Adrian Holovaty of EveryBlock.com and Django: Cyberstar.

Current issue of Scientific American deals with privacy and identity: How I Stole Someone’s Identity, Internet Eavesdropping: A Brave New World o Wiretapping, Data Fusion: The Ups and Downs of All-Encompassing Digital Profiles, Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?, Cryptography: How to Keep Your Secrets Safe.

And Apple bans a… comic book.

What does it mean when our media re-writes itself?

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Boing Boing decided to un-publish, remove from public view, Violet Blue related posts.

What does it mean when our media rewrites itself?

NYTimes: Link by Link – Poof! You’re Unpublished

Boing Boing on the matter.

Violet Blue (NSFW) on the matter.

There are quite a few fellow bloggers who have linked and commented about this – but without more info, it is just conjecture and I don’t wish to add to any of it.

However, I do want to stress the importance of the de-linking – note that the first two pages of Google search results on this subject don’t point to Violet Blue what so ever. You would think they would, but they don’t.

As Rafe states – links are currency on the Web. When we reach a certain level of influence, we’ve earned a responsibility, whether we want to own up to it or not. When we don’t live up to that responsibility, we lose credibility.

Boing Boing, in my book, has lost some.

Related:

Jeff Jarvis: Media is Singular (about time folks come around to this)

Politico: Media hype: How small stories become big news (what happens when new media take on old media mores or old media takes on new media mores or… well.. see above)

What have we become is the wrong question

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A great fellow Philly blogger, upon seeing that recent CNN video of a person ran over with no one helping posted a passionate piece questioning where our society is headed when a group of people can act so unconcerned about someone else’s welfare.

In his comments, I felt the need to remind him of Kitty Genovese.

Phil Ochs’s wrote a song about her in 1967, that, with its refrain, is all too painful.

The lyrics make me feel uncomfortable, and if they make you feel the same, then that says something about their ongoing relevancy.

“Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends”:

Look outside the window, there’s a woman being grabbed
They’ve dragged her to the bushes and now she’s being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But monopoly is so much fun, I’d hate to blow the game
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

Riding down the highway, yes, my back is getting stiff
Thirteen cars are piled up, they’re hanging on a cliff.
Maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain
But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it’s gonna rain
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

Sweating in the ghetto with the (colored/panthers) and the poor
The rats have joined the babies who are sleeping on the floor
Now wouldn’t it be a riot if they really blew their tops?
But they got too much already and besides, we got the cops
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

Oh, there’s a dirty paper using sex to make a sale
The Supreme Court was so upset, they sent him off to jail.
Maybe we should help the fiend and take away his fine.
But we’re busy reading playboy and the Sunday New York Times
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer,
But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years
Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why
But demonstrations are a drag, besides, we’re much too high
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

Oh, look outside the window, there’s a woman being grabbed
They’ve dragged her to the bushes and now she’s being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But monopoly is so much fun, I’d hate to blow the game
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

Down in Santiago where they took away our mines
We cut off all their money, so they robbed the storehouse blind
Now maybe we should ask some questions, maybe shed a tear
But I bet you a copper penny, it cannot happen here
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

I tend to think that the human condition is made of sterner stuff than our culture can throw at it. For good or ill.

That’s why we need to shout from the rooftops the good wherever we may find it. It is out here. There are great stories to tell. Heroes who break the mold everyday.

I know I don’t talk about them enough myself.

But the question is – does anyone care outside our circle of friends?

Less friends? You too?

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Coming from the Washington Post is news of a study that reveals people keep far fewer close friends these days.

I’ve seen this at work in my life and I’ve tried to rationalize it. I thought, possibly my work, and our growing family, were pressures here, but when faced honestly, this was gnawing at me for a long while. It sometimes seems the only friends I have are those who I personally reach out to, and I keep a short list I must admit, but now it seems far fewer confide back. A while ago I tried to meditate on what a friend was, thinking my definition was maybe too narrow. But possibly this is just a sign of the times. Of our increasingly busy and less trusting natures. Our electrons may meet in hyperspace for a while, but our hearts miss each other completely.

Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States.

A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two.

The comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties — once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits — are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to suffer alone.

“That image of people on roofs after Katrina resonates with me, because those people did not know someone with a car,” said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who helped conduct the study. “There really is less of a safety net of close friends and confidants.”

If close social relationships support people in the same way that beams hold up buildings, more and more Americans appear to be dependent on a single beam.

Compared with 1985, nearly 50 percent more people in 2004 reported that their spouse is the only person they can confide in. But if people face trouble in that relationship, or if a spouse falls sick, that means these people have no one to turn to for help, Smith-Lovin said.

“We know these close ties are what people depend on in bad times,” she said. “We’re not saying people are completely isolated. They may have 600 friends on Facebook.com [a popular networking Web site] and e-mail 25 people a day, but they are not discussing matters that are personally important.”

“the Internet is counterproductive to peace”

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Hey it’s not me, it’s John Perry Barlow saying that in a recent interview. He precedes this by saying, “There are a million virtual streetcorners with a million lonely pamphleteers on them, all of them decrying the war and not actually coming together in any organized fashion to oppose it. It strikes me that existing political institutions — whether it’s the administration or Congress or large corporations — only respond to other institutions. I don’t care how many individuals you have marching in the streets, they’re not going to pay attention until there’s a leader for those individuals who can come forward and say I represent the organization of those individuals and we’re going to amass the necessary money and votes to kick you the hell out of office. Then they pay attention. But not until. And so right at the moment it would strike me that the Internet is counterproductive to peace.”

Wow! Great quote!

John Perry Barlow, if you are not familiar with him, is co-founder of the Internet-legendary Electronic Frontier Foundation and a former songwriter for the Grateful Dead.

The interviewer says he’s shocked that Barlow would say this. He should read David Shenk’s 1998 classic, “Data Smog”. Time to read Bowling Alone. I’ve been putting it off for a little too long.

Update: Some Slashdotters take it personal while at MetaFilter they argue themselves into a circle.

Will there be a mass movement to utilize tools like MoveOn.org or will the prevailing me-too trend continue where individuals refuse to come together and decide to create their own competing efforts? Everyone shouting the same things – but seperate from each other. Barlow says there needs to be a leader to represent an institution. What I think he fails to see is that we’ve been taught not to trust leaders, even from amoungst us. Leaders fail and leaders fall. So do institutions. So we go our own way and trust in only ourselves. You can’t attribute that to the Internet. It’s the way our generation thinks. Decentralized. Individualized. The Internet is an expression of that. A multitude of choice and the freedom to us it.

The demographic trends do not favor one-size-fits-all news products,” said Peter Francese, founder of American Demographics magazine, which tracks population changes. “There isn’t one community to serve. It’s gone. … It’s now a matter of serving niches rather than trying to be all things to all people,” he said.

That’s from an article about 18-34 year olds rejecting traditional media and switching to the Internet for their news. The same trend has taken place in TV and Music. More choices. Smaller audiences. Less and less shared experience and information. It’s all out there – but it’s up to you to find it or the martketers to find you and lead you to it.