Posts by dyan campbell
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Excellent discussion - I agree and disagree with nearly everyone at some point.
Ben - algorithms and heuristics are all very well within incredibly small, finite parameters, . Some of my best friends are computational molecular biologists - but the number of variables they are dealing with are comparatively small. For instance, they're looking at the probabilities of how certain proteins might fold in solutions. Even then they only get a long, long list of probabilities and educated guesses of which avenue of research to pursue. But I don't see how you can possibly apply those models to something like evolution when you can't predict what the effects of natural selection - or unnatural selection are going to be. No one has any idea of the interconnectedness of various life forms, and it's only when they are disrupted that we begin to look. Frantically.
The number of disciplines, the sheer effort of research and the massive incentive to find the counterintuitive and far-fetched chain of events that led to the outbreak of the Machupo virus for instance, is a good example of how little we can predict about what effect - like cash crops instead of subsistence crops - or the use of DDT will have on the collective health or financial welfare of a population.
GE is constantly referred to as "science" and while I agree to work in the field you need a background in science, but you must agree, as Lewis Wolpert points out in his book book The Unnatural Nature of Science "science produces ideas, while technology produces usable products." Research of GE in agriculture is, by definition food technology, not science.
increasingly GM crops are for the poor.
Bart, which poor would these be? Because as someone has already pointed out in this conversation, the problems in the developing world are not food shortages but food distribution. Brazil is one of the biggest exporters of food on earth and 20% of their population go hungry. During the terrible crop failures, dust storms and food shortages of the 1930s that saw hugely prosperous countries like Canada and the USA scrambling to feed their starving poor, gargantuan quantities of milk, grain and produce were dumped into the sea. As David Suzuki has pointed out, the old 'think of the poor" argument is offensive with respect to the increasing industrialisation of agriculture.
Whether GE is safe or not in our food supply is not the point. The point is that GE is merely a commodity and it's not a particularly desired one at that.
Manipulation of genes is wonderful in the context of monoclonal antibodies or human hormones from e-coli, but the idea that we can "solve" problems in either agriculture or the eco system by adjusting this facet or that facet of one tiny variable in an equation with more variables than anyone can possibly imagine is just silly. You say we know more than we used to. Oh really? That's what we thought 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 140 years ago. And it was true each of those times. And we remain surprised by every subsequent realisation.
Unlikely agents such as flies, bears and trees (out of countless other variables) are essential in unlikely ways to the salmon industry in British Columbia. The use of DDT and the move to cash crops brought about the outbreak of the Machupo virus, in an equally unlikely and counterintuitively related chain of events.
In the case of GE food, what right has industry to foist their products on their unwilling customers? Why should the public submit itself to uncertain risks? Personally I'm not unwilling to eat GE foods and am pretty convinced they're harmless and I never, ever bother to buy anything organic unless it just tastes better. But lots of other peole don't want to eat GE food, and why should this product be foisted on them? Why should farmers have no recourse when their crops suffer GE contamination?
With respect to Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer who narrowly lost to Monsanto - he has been awarded the "Right Livliehood Prize" or "Alternative Nobel" that former PM David Lange was given a few years back. His battle and subsequent battles (as he is now suing Monsanto) are being watched with great interest by farmers around the world.
Percy Schmeiser Awarded Alternative Nobel
GE, Percy Schmeiser - from the International Environmental Law Research Centre
-
Oral STDs are indeed a problem, but nowhere near as much as teenage pregnancy, especially with genital STDs. So in terms of harm reduction it is a lesser of two evils. The kids are trying to be careful after all. So getting all down on oral sex is likely to backfire in bad ways.
Peter I'm not making any judgement at all about oral sex - as someone who worked with male prostitutes a generation ago when GRID (later known as AIDS) hit the headlines I am interested in pathogens and how they affect human health. What I'm getting at is the massive shift in sexual behaviour that is resulting in much higher rates of oral STDs. In all developed countries. What changed?
There may be shifts in cultural norms and behaviour but I seriously doubt that suddenly girls like blowing boys many times more than they did a generation ago. What is changing the behaviour is not clear, but I really don't think this reflects sexual desire. Certainly there has been no corresponding rise in oral-vaginal sex, which indicates to me that it has less to do with sexual desire than cultural norms.
As there are new epidemics and patterns within epidemics emerging it's prudent to follow any changes in sexual behaviour and to revise advice given. While oral-genital sex is certainly safer than genital-genital or genital-anal sex, there are ever increasing risks and these need to be made commonly known. A generation ago it was believed venereal disease (most infectious disease period) was conquered. We have seen in the past 20 years how very wrong that assumption was.
As for the age reduction. When I was a first year uni student back in '84, being 18 didn't stop us going to the pub. It made buying booze to take to the beach much harder.
The danger of alcohol sales to 18 year olds is not to the 18 year olds per se, but to their younger peers. A 20 year old is not likely to supply alcohol to a younger teen - an 18 year old is.
Seeking a chemical anaesthesia, like they see their elders do, thus becomes a rational response to a world that offers them few palatable choices.
I think it's normal and human to want to experience some form of impairment. "Doors of Perception" Aldous Huxley wrote. I"'m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else" sang the Lemonheads. "Just a couple fingers of scotch to take the edge off... before I come to school." explained my high-school boyfriend, when I complained he tasted of alcohol as much as toothpaste when he greeted me at school 35 years ago. Not that he didn't have his reasons - and I literally never saw him even remotely impaired. But my point is that yes, since time immemorial people have wanted to alter their perceptions.
The difference now is the dose children are ingesting. It's one thing to drink until you're drunk and you recover. It's quite another thing to drink so much you will die if you don't have medical attention - and the latter is becoming much more common.
There seems to have been a sharp rise in both how fucked up a kid wants to get on alcohol, and how fast they think should ingest the stuff.
I think trend is being driven by alcohol marketing. As Gio pointed out, it comes from mainstream society - the alcohol industry - but it is being marketed as an "antisocial" or "outlaw" behaviour.
I see a parallel in the way we are forever being told that today's teens are the most media savvy and least susceptible to advertising, but at the same time they are the most product conscious and brand loyal generation ever. Either they are the least susceptible to advertising or they are the most brand loyal - but not at the same time - the two things are mutually exclusive. I think being told they're "media savvy" is just another marketing tool being used on teenagers. "You're so sophisticated and media savvy you'll only buy our product.
So alcohol and sexual behaviour are symptoms of a wider malaise and we will not be able to counter them in isolation.
Peter, I heartily agree except I don't think the malaise is affecting only young people - I do think the ill effects only show up more quickly dramatically there. We expect alcohol induced liver failure in older people... eventually... - but when it's seen in those very young, apropos of a single drinking binge episode, we notice.
One question: why aren't those teenagers motivated to do something more constructive?
I don't think teenagers are any less motivated than they were in previous generations. I do think they are less connected to live human beings than they once were - the number of face-to-face hours with other people must be miniscule compared to previous generations.
And I think the restrictions on childhood must be suffocating - that Prof Winston guy - don't know how reliable his stats are - is quoted as saying the average 8 year old a generation ago ranged 8 km from home unaccompanied by an a adult - it's now 50 metres. If that's true I can see how it could drive anyone to substance abuse and random sex once they were old enough to try either.
-
I was very sorry to hear that Paul Reynolds has died - I knew him only slightly, but liked him very much. Paul wrote a book about the internet with David Merritt, and was one of the first people I met who was on the internet back in '93 or so. His family must be bereft, and my thoughts are with his wife Helen and his kids.
-
dyan campbell - there is some evidence that things were very much worse in the first 4 decades of concentrated European settlement here.
This is very true for NZs early history Islander, I certainly agree with that.
But the current cause for alarm is within a single generation. The behaviour and consequences re: youth drinking are changing very radically.
The huge increase in demand for fresh donor livers is cause for considerable alarm (not to mention ethical debates. Also the doubling of youth ODs on alcohol resulting in death in less than one generation suggests despite what we assume about days gone by, drinking patterns among young people have changed.
67% Rise in Need for Liver Transplants
Talking alcohol consumption. Kids have - it appears - always given it a go, when available.
Give it a go, maybe, but much of the culture around drinking involves vomiting as part of the sport. It used to be an unintended and unfortunate result of too much drinking: now it is emerging as a goal of drinking sessions. The drive to make kids drink as much and as quickly as is humanly possible is being seen all around the developed world and is being driven by something.
The concept of hard drinking - not social drinking, but drinking very, very quickly and enormous quantities - is becoming entwined with youth culture in terms of identity, personal freedom, fun and conviviality, hip-ness and cool-ness and a rebel stance against a wowser society. This is a product of viral marketing and is not coming from youth or society at all.
And that's the thing that is now different - and can easily be sorted: kids like sweet & fizzy drinks. Ban alcho-pop.
Banning drinks aimed at kids, yes, good idea. But not the problem: the problem was lowering the drinking age. 20 year olds don't supply alcohol to younger peers - not 12 - 16 year olds - 18 year olds do.
sexual activity routinely began at puberty among Polynesians (including Maori) and was not discouraged (except when it went across rank lines, or involved puhi.) And it certainly wasnt unknown at that age & stage among the second wave of settlers-
Well, yes and STDs devestated indigenous populations, didn't they?
But again, 150 years ago is not really the benchmark modern public health is measuring itself against. And penetrative sex - genital-genital - is not the only thing that is meant by sexual activity - part of the alarm is due to the very sharp rise in oral STDs (if you can get it in your genitals, you can get it in your mouth/throat) among very young people.
Of course HPV is only one of the diseases they are seeing - all oral STDs are up sharply due to the changed in sexual practices - you'd be surprised at how young and how many partners. The framwork re: oral sex (fellatio anyway) has changed radically in a single generation.
This is something that is easily followed by the rate of oral STDs and the ages at which they are being seen, and things are changing drastically out there.
-
In my home town a good proportion of the males in my age group are lying in the local cemeteries from motorcycle and car accidents, many involving alcohol. This happened before all the media coverage, guilt inducing nanny state legislation and justifications for curtailing civil liberties.
Your memories are like mine - I remember three young men dying in succession at my high school back in the 70s in Canada - all three from booze, in a city awash with hard drugs at the time. But what you may remember and what is actually happening if you are in the business of paying attention to these things are not necessarily the same things. The landscape out there has changed, and the consequences can be far reaching.
Do you guys really think it's always been like this?
I also want to point out this is worldwide and is a pretty weird phenomenon, driven by something.
-
Dyan, you could apply the same argument to sex, though.
Wasn't around on the telly or in films much a few decades back, now it's everywhere. But that doesn't mean that people weren't getting it on back in the day.Actually sexual behaviour has changed drastically - both in terms of which activities and at what age. This is proving both alarming and problematic and is part of what Peter Gluckman was on about, I believe.
The causes are all up for dispute - but the results are easily monitored.
Same with drinking. Just cos it wasn't on telly, doesn't mean that young folk weren't partying till they puked.
Again, the degree of intoxication and the age at which people are starting to drink have drastically changed, with horrifying results.
The number of kids dying from alcohol OD in the UK has doubled in 14 years. This is being seen around the world but the Brits keep such nice stats.
-
the bodies natural defence mechanisms. I don't recall there being any evidence of an association with an alcohol company
My apologies for the complete statement of opinion not clarified as such - I didn't mean to say this was in any way proved or even an opinion shared by others... it's just an observation made by someone fairly old who has watched society change hugely.
When the films The Exorcist or The Fourth of July and the miniseries Brideshead Revisited came out there was considerable attention paid to the graphic inclusion of a vomiting scene. Back in the day, vomiting was not everyday tv fare. Now it's hard to avoid in any and all contexts: weird food-dare shows, reality tv drunken ho shows, out of it washed up celebrity shows, cooking shows, survival shows... whatever the context. But it has also emerged in the context of fictional tv series young people who are just having a good time getting drunk. It's been normalised as in, there is no reference to the idea that it might be a serious consequence of poisoning. True, it's the body's natural defense, but that's not something you want to invoke - poisoning yourself to the point where vomiting is necessary to keeping you alive. The body is defending itself for a reason.
The average tv show - Go Girls, Shortland Street, Outrageous Fortune, etc - now depict getting very drunk to the point of being hung over and vomiting- as normal, acceptable, funny and okay.
If you watch an episode of tv from any other era, young people are depicted drinking orange juice, soda, coffe; the advent of a carefully product-placement placed booze label in every shot is relatively recent.
But I have this paranoid notion that booze companies are circumventing blocks to advertising to young people (sponsoring and so on) by a combination of product placement and changing the very type of behaviour that is considered normal.
What drinking behaviour is considered normal is changing right around the world - there is a mass-culture attitude shift. I don't think it's womens lib, any more than when I saw it happen with cigarettes - advertising companies conflated feminism with smoking. I see it now with youth culture, the concept of freedom, self-expression, fun and identity conflated with drinking. I think it's driven by viral marketing and evil alcohol companies. But that's just me. And it did turn out to be true about tobacco companies and they denied it every step of the way.
If you look at Steinlager ads, they typify the kind of pitch to young people that is being clamped down on in ads, and is now popping up in tv and film storylines.
But again, apologies... I was rambling out loud... I don't expect you to agree at all...
-
My personal wish is that the notions of 'obesity', 'premature maturation', 'diabetes', and a number of other conditions too extensive to list, are not looked at without due consideration of environmental factors.
This is being examined pretty closely...
I'm pretty sure when Peter Gluckman talks about "improved nutritional status" I think he means compared to 200 years ago, not 40 years ago. Simply put, not starving is good but feeding a child more than s/he can metabolise without become insulin resistant with high markers of inflammation is not so good.
In the USA for the first time in the history of the developed world, people are shorter than the previous generation which would indicate a less than ideal nutritional status. At the same time, the onset of sexual maturity is much, much lower than ever before. Especially in poorer populations - richer kids mature later.
In populations that have the greatest longevity (Okinawa etc - so called "Blue Zones") i.e. ideal nutritional status, you have a later onset of puberty than you would find in the poorest (i.e. most nutritionally deprived members of the population) in developed countries.
In other words, a skinny kid in Okinawa is likely to have better nutrition, longer life expectancy and a much smaller body than an obese kid in any developed nation. The kid in Okinawa will also have a later onset of sexual maturity.
Like so:
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
The expression of genes favoring the storage of excess calories as fat, which have been selected for over many millennia and are relatively static, has become maladaptive in a rapidly changing environment that minimizes opportunities for energy expenditure and maximizes opportunities for energy intake.
The consequences of childhood and adolescent obesity include earlier puberty and menarche in girls, type 2 diabetes and increased incidence of the metabolic syndrome in youth and adults, and obesity in adulthood.
In NZ a much earlier onset of puberty is seen among Pacific Island children than European children; though PI children are more likely to have excess weight (greater total nutrition) than their European counterparts, they are not more likely to have more ideal nutritional status.
There is also some fascinating research being done on the psycho-social effects of an absent father on the onset of sexual maturity -
Onset of Menarche and Absent Father
There have also been studies indicating that higher social status and greater education in the mother results in later sexual maturation in both girls and boys. Go figure.
As far as the massive rise in alcohol poisoning and binge drinking (this is a worldwide, not a national trend) - it looks to me like a massive push from the liquor industry to normalise binge drinking, vomiting and juvenile alcohol consumption. The rise of televised vomiting and the glorification of binge drinking culminating in vomiting has been lock-step in time with the tightening of controls of marketing alcohol to youth; similarly the rise of cigarette smoking in films seemed related to the tightening of promotion of tobacco.
Sneaky marketing, that's what it is. Bring on the World Health Organisation, yeah! They dealt to the tobacco industry pretty effectively, I wait with interest to see what they do to the alcohol industry.
-
It was really Winnie Cooper who distinguished herself after The Wonder years.
Please excuse these showbiz digressions... but another little known (and equally little-believed) fact:
Hedy Lamarr was one of the inventors of frequency hopping spread-sprectrum communications. -
the Amis men have the opposite problem. Even as cherubic toddlers, there was something of the night about Marty and Kingers. :)
They do indeed.
I used to have this fascinating book of photographs of famous people as children, called As They Were and it was surprising who looked like what. Clark Gable looked exactly like Clark Gable (sans moustache) at 6. Jean-Paul Sartre looked like a Christmas card angel at 4 and like a... well, not a pretty, sweet-faced Christmas card angel.
Getting back to Brandon Cruz - he is still very recognisable as cute little Eddie except now he's a huge muscled dude, covered in tats and his black hair is now a grey crewcut. He looks like Eddie with Henry Rollins superimposed over him.