Ban the Laptops!

Every once in a while we have a "no technology" week at TAS. It helps with getting some perspective on the creeping overgrowth of digital mediation. Eugene Volokh, a law professor and blogger, did an experiment:

Results of Student Survey About My No-Laptop-in-Class Experiment

are in this memo I wrote to my colleagues (with pie charts). Summary:

What effect did the no-laptop policy have on	Strongly negative	Slightly negative	Neutral	Slightly positive	Strongly positive
... your concentration in class?	2%	8%	19%	40%	31%
... your finding the class time interesting?	0%	6%	42%	29%	23%
... your learning the material?	4%	19%	41%	19%	17%
... the usefulness of your notes for studying?	19%	33%	21%	12%	15%
... your overall enjoyment of the course?	0%	12%	34%	29%	25%

With this in mind, let me offer a few suggestions to my fellow professors:

(1) If you think a no-laptop policy might help, experiment with it. I’ve noted above some reasons why my experience might not be generalizable from the sexy first-semester Criminal Law class. But if some of us get and report more data in other classes, all of us will get a better perspective.

(2) If you want to try a no-laptop policy, tell students up front about the generally positive reaction my students have reported. This should make them more open to the experiment, and at least decrease any immediate flak you might get from the students. No need to start the semester by making your students resentful.

(3) Warn students in the syllabus about the policy, and briefly explain that it’s an experiment from which you’re trying to learn, for the benefit of future students. My sense is that this will help students feel open to the policy, and will help deflect skepticism about whether the policy will work: I’m not sure whether it will work myself, you can tell them — that’s why I’m trying this as an experiment, though I also have some tentative feedback from others that leads me to think it will be a successful experiment.

(4) For the second- and third-year classes, note the policy in the class description, so that students won’t be surprised — or, if they will be surprised, you can politely convey to them that the surprise was their fault.

(5) If you do try such a policy, please conduct a survey after the end of the course, follow up with the students at least once to get a decent response rate, and share the results with the rest of us.

We've seen this before

Why are anti-psychotic drugs a concern of a high school? One would think that a powerful drug, with immense-side effects, developed to treat adults who have had nothing but ineffective treatment and tremendous difficulty throughout their lives, would be used very, very cautiously in regards to children.

Wrong. Instead these drugs are though of in terms of "market share". The intent is to aggressively increase the pool of consumers far beyond those of us who suffer from the most crippling symptoms of schizophrenia. Depressed adults, sleepless teens, unruly children. It goes without saying that there is no research available concerning safety or long term effects of these drugs on children.

And no studies on the safety of mixing these with other drugs, proscribed or otherwise. But why would that give pause to those devoted to increasing market share, as if a medical treatment is just another consumer product? I doubt that there is much possibility for "informed consent" in this kind of project.

Seroquel is a newer drug; many thousands of teenagers now take it. It was developed to replace Haldol (which largely replaced Thorazine as the treatment of choice for psychotic symptoms). I have met numerous teenagers who take Seroquel, only one of them had a history of psychotic symptoms. This is called "off-label" usage. No empirical studies back this usage up. Evidence is almost purely anecdotal or via advertisement and company sponsored parties and conferences.

A total of ten clinical trials were included in the meta-analysis, which variously compared Seroquel to placebo, Haldol, and several other antipsychotic medications. Four trials compared Seroquel to Haldol. Several subscales of the BPRS (Brief Psychotic Rating Scale) were included in the analysis.

When examining the amount of change on the BPRS, Seroquel consistently outperformed placebo, both on the BPRS total score and on several of the BPRS subscales. However, in several analyses, Seroquel was outperformed by Haldol and by risperidone (Risperdal; Janssen's antipsychotic). The document states: "Against 'all doses' of Seroquel, each of the three significant p-values generated was in favour of Haloperidol (Total BPRS, Factor V, and Hostility Cluster). There was no evidence of significant differences between the treatments when Haloperidol was compared to high-dose Seroquel." This is a plain admission that Haldol outperformed Seroquel on several outcomes, but that high dose Seroquel yielded approximately equivalent results to Haldol.

This is an excerpt from A Closer Look. I recommend following this blog if these issues interest you. It would seem that a drug developed to eat up Haldol's share of the market doesn't work any better, but is much more expensive. Meanwhile the company pushes hard to have the drug used for symptoms and populations that have not been studied for safety or efficacy.

Typical, I am afraid.

Thursday Edition

Good Morning!

My understanding of philosophy is pretty limited, and I often find myself stalled in the pages of "philosophical works", especially the drier ones, like Kant's. But...it is pretty clear he nailed it with an early formulation of his categorical imperative: act only in such a way that would be acceptable as a universal law.
A corollary of this is do not treat people as if they are a means to an end. Treating people as an abstraction, as a number, as an experiment, or as something to generate wealth from is exactly this.

True, I wheel around to the psycho-pharmaceutical industry quite often. The main reason is that it is so corrupt and has a gigantic and often harmful impact on young people. And when the corruption involves major medical schools, journals, giant corporations, and the execution of basic science, I don't think enough can be said.

Over the next few days I will be posting a few items on some pretty rotten practices. Hopefully the tide is turning against these doctors, scientists, lobbyists, and writers that are engaging in them. If the basis of ethical, humanistic action is to "not use people as a means to an end" then perhaps the only way of avoiding doing so is to insure full and informed consent.

The distortion of experimental findings makes consent on the consumer's part absolutely impossible.

Read this article on Harvard's Medical School. Here is a teaser:

BOSTON — In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

“I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.”

Mr. Zerden’s minor stir four years ago has lately grown into a full-blown movement by more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty, intent on exposing and curtailing the industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard’s 17 affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes.

Triple-Embedded Cross Post Wednesday Edition

Hilzoy, a favorite of mine, comes through with a head scratcher and a must read:

Michael Lewis has a piece (h/t) about Iceland and its economic collapse in Vanity Fair. Besides being fascinating, it's also wonderfully written. Felix Salmon excerpted this bit, and I will too:

"Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called "hidden people" -- or, to put it more plainly, elves -- in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, "we couldn't as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people." The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did. "In manufacturing," says the spokesman, "you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don't want them to be heroes. You don't want them to try to fix something it's not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place." The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn't his job to fix.

Back away from the Icelandic economy and you can't help but notice something really strange about it: the people have cultivated themselves to the point where they are unsuited for the work available to them. All these exquisitely schooled, sophisticated people, each and every one of whom feels special, are presented with two mainly horrible ways to earn a living: trawler fishing and aluminum smelting. There are, of course, a few jobs in Iceland that any refined, educated person might like to do. Certifying the nonexistence of elves, for instance. ("This will take at least six months -- it can be very tricky.") But not nearly so many as the place needs, given its talent for turning cod into Ph.D.'s. At the dawn of the 21st century, Icelanders were still waiting for some task more suited to their filigreed minds to turn up inside their economy so they might do it.

Enter investment banking."

Indeed.

I wondered, though: could the bit about the elves possibly be true? According to Iceland's Tourist Bureau, the answer is basically: yes, although they make the part about making sure that construction sites are elf-free sound more voluntary, and the 'hidden people' include not just elves but gnomes, trolls, fairies, and others:

"Builders of the country's first shopping mall took care to lay electrical cables and other underground installations well away from the suspected homes of gnomes and fairies. Couples who are planning a new house will sometimes hire "elf-spotters" to make sure the lot is free of spirit folk. Such broadmindedness might be just self-protection. Tales abound of broken limbs, busted equipment and other woes befalling builders daring to go where elves and hidden people traditionally tread.

The Iceland road authority typically responds with sensitivity, routing roads around hallowed boulders or delaying construction long enough to give non-human constituents time to find new accommodations.

When bulldozers kept breaking down during work on a new road a few years ago at Ljarskogar, about three hours drive north of Reykjavik, road crews solved the problem in an unorthodox way but one which is fairly common in Iceland. They accepted an offer from a medium to find out if the land was populated by elves and, if so, were they causing the disruptions.

Viktor A. Ingolfsson, a spokesman for the road agency, says, "When Native Americans protest roads being built over ancient burial grounds, the U.S. listens. It's the same here. There are people who believe in elves and we don't make fun of them. We try to deal with them.""

Possibly the Icelandic banks should have made sure there were no hidden people lurking in their balance sheets, waiting to take revenge on anyone who disturbed them.

In other TAS news, a snow day Monday and a field trip day Tuesday means Wednesday will be pretty busy...

Ski Details

Be at school at 7:30. Van leaves before eight. Have a great time!

Tuesday

The annual ski trip is suddenly blessed by...good skiing conditions. Meanwhile, I take a few students to the Hayden Planetarium in NYC. A few diligent souls will stay behind to tick away at their work as the term comes to a close.

I spent the weekend at Zen Mountain Monastery. It was sesshin, a longish period of silence, no eye contact, and intensive meditation. Was it difficult to pile on ten or twelve hours of meditation? Physically, no. But I came up hard against a riot in my skull. It was not, not in the least, a quiet weekend.

The Catskills are a place of deep association for me. I camped there often as a scout, and the headwaters of the Delaware, my favorite of all rivers, are tucked away up there. This monastery- a serene, Swedish Arts and Crafts style building backed by a couple hundred acres of mountain- has at its feet a pretty little creek converging with the strong Esopus. Twelve kind and lively monks levitate back and forth between the temple in Brooklyn and the redoubt in the mountains.

Peaceful, serious, with a clear program set out for whomever wants that sort of hard effort. I was happy to get home, but more than a little wired on chocolate. Soon, my mood collapsed. What I wanted was more silence, more chances to face what I missed. The snow storm shook me out of my doldrums and pushed me into the world again, but I found all this very, very interesting.

I intend to write a bit more about such things.

SCHOOL CANCELLED MONDAY

Looks like March is storming in.