Month: July 2016

My Sleep Button: for Insomniacs

The purpose of this web page is to explain the scientific rationale of mySleepButton.

mySleepButton is based on a new super-somnolent mentation theory of sleep induction proposed by CogSci Apps Corp. co-founder, Luc P. Beaudoin. Beaudoin published this theory in an open-access paper on March 31, 2013 at Simon Fraser University where he is adjunct professor:

The possibility of super-somnolent mentation: A new information-processing approach to sleep-onset acceleration and insomnia exemplified by serial diverse imagining (MERP Report No. 2013–03).Meta-effectiveness Research Project, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University.

MySleepButton

Report on physician sexual abuse stirs alarm

(CNN)A yearlong investigation conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, published last week, uncovered thousands of cases of physician sexual abuse spread across every state in America. Emotions ran deep, especially among patient advocates and sexual violence centers.

“The results are very concerning,” said Laura Palumbo, a spokeswoman for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. “It is astounding that, at the systemic level, there seem to be conditions where sexual abuse is allowed to happen and physicians aren’t held accountable.”
Violations during physician-patient encounters can cause deep harm to patients since trust is “the absolute cornerstone of the whole relationship,” said Julia A. Hallisy, founder and president of the Empowered Patient Coalition. Hallisy is a dentist and has experienced the loss of her daughter to cancer; she understands firsthand that doctors bear witness to some of the happiest and most tragic moments in people’s lives.
CNN

Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy

A growing number of young people are selling their bodies online to pay student loans, make the rent, or afford designer labels. Is it just an unorthodox way to make ends meet or a new kind of exploitation?

…

“The girlfriend experience” is the term women in the sex trade use for a service involving more than just sex. “They want the perfect girlfriend—in their eyes,” says Miranda, the young woman at our table.* “She’s well groomed, cultured, classy, able to converse about anything—but not bringing into it any of her real-world problems or feelings.”

Vanity Fair

Six Snowballs Thrown in the Gun-Control Debate

People will recall that, not so long ago, Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, in order to conclusively demonstrate that claims of man-made climate change were false, made a snowball after a February storm and threw it on the Senate floor. I demonstrate it thus! If I see frozen water, how can the planet be warming? What was so beautiful about this demonstration was that it did not even depend on a snowball made out of season, one packed and tossed, say, in September or April—this was a mid-winter snowball, and it still refuted global warming, for once and all.

Anyone who follows the debate on any public issue discovers that the snowball-in-the-Senate style of argumentation persists, with the same note of smugness—that’ll show them! It most often comes from the same political direction, or party, and with the same disconnection from all familiar standards of evidence and argument. In the debate about the necessity of bringing America into agreement with the rest of the civilized world on the issue of guns and gun killings, there are some persistent snowballs-in-the-Senate that keep getting thrown, which need to be mopped up as they melt.

The New Yorker

Are You Ready for Some Hard Truths About the Birth of Our Nation? Brace Yourself

Ah, July 4th. Of all the national orgies of self-congratulation, militarism and, of course, shopping, this one stands out. Even more than, say, Memorial Day, it perfectly captures the combination of myths and ignorance that make up the fairy-tale view we hold of our national origins and character.

Better understanding our history is especially important to our ongoing struggle to come to terms with white racism. The truth is its roots run much deeper than most whites even begin to understand or acknowledge.

Fortunately, a new generation of scholars is bringing new research and perspective to our understanding of what really happened and therefore why white racism is so intractable. (A partial list of essential recent books appears at the end of this article.)

AlterNet

Making a Killing

More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade than all the Americans who were killed in combat in the Second World War. When an off-duty security guard named Omar Mateen, armed with a Sig Sauer semiautomatic rifle and a Glock 17 pistol, killed forty-nine people at a gay club in Orlando, on June 12th, it was historic in some respects and commonplace in others—the largest mass shooting in American history and, by one count, the hundred-and-thirtieth mass shooting so far this year. High-profile massacres can summon our attention, and galvanize demands for change, but in 2015 fatalities from mass shootings amounted to just two per cent of all gun deaths. Most of the time, when Americans shoot one another, it is impulsive, up close, and apolitical.

None of that has hurt the gun business. In recent years, in response to three kinds of events—mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and talk of additional gun control—gun sales have broken records. “You know that every time a bomb goes off somewhere, every time there’s a shooting somewhere, sales spike like crazy,” Paul Jannuzzo, a former chief of American operations for Glock, the Austrian gun company, told me.

New Yorker

Murder by Poison

In early-nineteenth-century England, a good way to get rid of your husband was arsenic. A medical examiner usually couldn’t tell whether the poison was involved, because the symptoms—diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain—are much like those of other disorders. Nor could he necessarily place you at the murder scene. The dying typically took hours. Also, you could administer the poison gradually, a little bit every day. In the mid-century, arsenic poisoning was commonly the resort of women. (In 1851, the House of Lords tried to pass a law forbidding women to buy arsenic.) But unpleasant husbands were not the only people you might want to eliminate. During this period of feverish social mobility, a young person might be waiting impatiently for an inheritance, and there was Uncle Ted, sitting on all that money and meanwhile bossing you around, toying with your hopes. In such cases, male poisoners presumably outnumbered females.

The New Yorker