#248 posted by scottfree , March 27, 2008 9:11 PM

"Wow, did every single user weigh in?"

I didn't... oh wait. Darn.

In response to Arkizzle #64 and others, who make the point that if 25% of children (to choose a likely number) are sexually abused, then it must not be that big a deal because our society is chugging along pretty well, I say: Are you sure?

One citation states that 25% of children in the US experience a significant traumatic event by age 16, and that about 20% of those will go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, with sexual abuse being more likely to produce PTSD than the average. That's 5% of the total US population clinically impaired, of which direct abuse and sexual abuse contribute some unknown fraction. If 1 in 4 children are in fact sexually abused *to the point of being traumatized*, then that alone would produce the rate of at least 5% PTSD in the adult population.

The incidence of major depression in the US is 6.5% for women, 3.3% for men, with an additional 13 to 27% of the population suffering subclinical depression that still results in lost productivity and increased use of health care services. A history of abuse isn't the only reason for depression, but current research is starting to indicate it may be a major contributor. Both past abuse and current depression are associated with lowered self-esteem, which in turn tends to lead to both criminal behavior and victimhood in adults. How much lower would the prison population be without the contribution of sexual abuse? How much would the gender gap in salaries be narrowed if women weren't abused at twice the rate of men? How much spouse abuse would be prevented if a lower percentage of women had low self-esteem? And in general, wouldn't our society be better off if that one person in 20 were not impaired by their past?

Numbers for incidence of depression:
http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/d/depression/prevalence.htm

Numbers for incidence of abuse and PTSD in children:
http://www.emedicine.com/ped/topic2650.htm

#20:

"Just because you can detect a compound in the environment does not necessarily mean it will have an effect on an organism in that environment. Animals have many physiological ways to deal with toxic/dangerous compounds - it is only when these defense mechanisms get overwhelmed that damage/negative effects occur in the animal."

Truly toxic/dangerous compounds are easy to detect, when you see bank-to-bank dead fish in a river. We're increasingly finding that trace amounts of chemicals, far below established standards or at the limits of detection, can have systemic effects on wildlife and possibly humans. Some of them are synergistic, making the effects even harder to pin down. Do some searching on 'endocrine disruptors' or bisphenol A. There's plenty of evidence of reproductive abnormalities in fish, for instance, associated with the outflows of sewage treatment systems, but few instances of replicating the abnormalities with specific compounds out of the thousands swilling around the system.

Here's an example of estrogenic compounds perturbing fish gender at 1 part per trillion:
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2006/dec/10/fish-sex-change-investigatedx1/?printer=1/

Detailed coverage of the research into abnormal gender in fish in Boulder Creek:
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/basin/topical/haa.html

Detecting a compound in the environment may not mean it is harmful, but since we know a) harm is happening, b) pollution is a factor, and c) trace amounts can be dangerous, then there's cause to be suspicious of just about any contaminant. We cannot continue to assume that trace amounts are probably safe, or that most species are probably tolerant, because we've already been burned several times now.

This quote is from the Yahoo article linked by BB:

"For several decades, federal environmental officials and nonprofit watchdog environmental groups have focused on regulated contaminants — pesticides, lead, PCBs — which are present in higher concentrations and clearly pose a health risk.

However, some experts say medications may pose a unique danger because, unlike most pollutants, they were crafted to act on the human body.

"These are chemicals that are designed to have very specific effects at very low concentrations. That's what pharmaceuticals do. So when they get out to the environment, it should not be a shock to people that they have effects," says zoologist John Sumpter at Brunel University in London, who has studied trace hormones, heart medicine and other drugs. "

Antinous #22, QOTD. I hope you don't mind if I wear your quote in my signature for a few weeks... because I intend to. ; )

Parasitism may be natural and inevitable, but why is that a reason to condone it? We're supposed to have a society, not just a food chain.

Change the laws, sure, starting with articles such as this one. Volunteer at credit counseling services. That doesn't stop the immediate problem of the sharks claiming everything from the victims they've forced to default. That, needs to be done via class-action lawsuits. Predatory lending is already illegal in some states; there's a good summary of the topic here.

http://www.consumerlaw.org/issues/payday_loans/pay_menu.shtml

There are action groups in various states, and also the Center for Responsible Lending:

http://www.responsiblelending.org/issues/payday/

In the meantime, maybe we can start by organizing pickets of your local loan sharks on the day when their victims come in, if that's still the first of the month. A little TV attention should help warn the victims and get some attention on the need for rate caps, closure of loopholes such as calling a loan a 'service' and applying nothing from payments to the principal, and reporting illegal lending rates.

They're about to start going after tax checks, so now's an auspicious time.

Reply to Clifton #11:

"Well, Mercedes Lackey for one says she writes fanfic (game-based) but the difference I see is that she hasn't come out and said "Here's a complete fanfic novel I wrote, enjoy!"

-------

She does have one and a half complete novels done, but they happen to be in podcast form. With Steve Libbey, she's well into Book Two of the Secret World Chronicle, based in a metahuman-filled world. Those are here:

http://www.secretworldchronicle.com/

I'm a City of Heroes player that's had the privilege of interacting with Mercedes Lackey. Her fanfic grew out of roleplay in the CoH game, and her publisher isn't messing with it because she is a 'fantasy' not 'superhero' writer. It mostly appears within her guild's forums, here:

http://www.4-thirty-5.com/rpc/

Though one story was published by special arrangement in the fanfic section of the June 2005 CoH comic. Link to PDF download here:

ftp://ftp.coh.com/comics/topcow/comic_02.pdf

Enjoy. - Pteryxx

To Isaac #21:

"Have any of the US Presidential candidates said anything to indicate that they're contemplating reforming DHS and the TSA?"

Check out Ron Paul.

These from 2002 when the DHS was being voted upon:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul61.html

http://www.antiwar.com/paul/paul54.html

And this from May 2007:

http://www.antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=10966

To #2 Jake0748:

"Now... if somebody produced a fancy, expensive t=shirt that said "DRM Sucks", THAT I might consider buying."

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/04/antidrm-tshirt-desig.html

Enjoy.

In response to Grumblebee #136:

"I go to a movie and I'm willing to work with the filmmakers to a point.

I'm curious about this statement. You're not the first person I've heard say some version of it. I'm not criticizing you. I'm sure it's a meaningful statement. It's just hard for me to understand. What sort of work are you doing?...

-- you notice the blunder, but you do mental work to keep yourself from dwelling on it. You try to think about other things, etc. "

That's almost exactly what I need to do. A mistake that falls in one of my fields of depth is as distracting as a physical blow, and takes an effort to ignore both the initial shock and then the sense of alarm, betrayal, or outrage that follows. The severity of the shock, and thus the mental effort needed to resist it, depend on my own constellation of fields which are of great value to me. In my case, they are genetics, animal behavior, medicine, strategy, and sports.

So the aforementioned downhill cavalry charge into massed pikes, for instance, burned me some. My strategy calculator says the sun in the enemy's eyes and breaking their morale was insufficient to overcome their strategic advantage. The mental reaction though was 'WTF... no, no, no.' and then to grope desperately for some assumption that would repair the damage. It didn't quite ruin the movie for me, but on every viewing I can't forget that scene is coming up and I'm relieved when it's over. I have to look away from the screen, mentally dissociate from the scene and just pretend that the orcs were so shocked that they didn't get their pikes grounded in time.

Labeling errors such as the Cloverfield sign just cause me a flinch and a raised eyebrow, easily ignored. However, when some story makes a fundamental screw-up about what DNA is for, I'll go into a hopping rage and never watch that thing again.

I was going to reply to Teresa at #38, but she beat me to it with #53.

As soon as one starts to do anything 'for real', professionally or not, you have to adopt and train the analytical instinct. That holds for writing, art, sports, cooking, human resources, whatever. It's necessary to critique and strengthen your own abilities and those of others. But having honed that weapon, it's now constantly ready and weighing on your mind. You have to separate it from yourself with effort, and pretend not to know what you know, to enjoy your field the way you did when you were a joyous rookie in the beer leagues. That love was what made us start on the path to professionalism, and leave behind forever the level of innocent play. It's serious work now, with its own beauty. But sometimes, through immersion in someone else's world, or maybe by teaching newcomers, we can recapture some of what it meant to be fresh and new.

"Want to know why so many writers have an alcohol problem? Because after one or two shots, you reach a state where that little nonstop critical voice in your head will shut the hell up and let you get some writing done."

QOTD.

I recall a previous article about how the US lags behind other wired countries in cheap plentiful bandwidth availability. How do these other countries deal with P2P traffic? Do they have so much bandwidth that P2P users can't put a dent in it? Or are P2P users so much more of the population in the US?

If other countries can handle massive P2P traffic, then it only proves that the providers' effective monopolies in the US are allowing them to get away with a substandard product. Perhaps this failure to upgrade network capacity is what spurred the creation of distributed filesharing in the first place - to make the most efficient use of pathetic architecture.

To David B.:

You don't have to spam your blog address. Just tell us 'I commented further on my blog' and if we're interested, we'll get your address from your profile and have a look.

It seems to me that competing for rack space in actual stores is a waste of time, not just for SF but for any magazine that consists of pieces longer than a few hundred words, or that doesn't have pictures. If new readers don't come through that route, then why waste issues and transport costs to put them there? I'd gladly pay for an online subscription with an option for paper. For one thing, then my back issues would be searchable!