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At twelve weeks, there is no difference between cognitive behavioral
therapy for depression and psychoanalytic therapy, even though the APA
supports CBT as the treatment of choice. That is one example of many,
many studies. <br>
<br>
Combining medication and therapy has an additive effect. In one study,
52% of psychotherapy patients were improved, 55% of medication
patients, but 85% of combined patients were improved. (Kelly, et al,
2000, NEJM). Complete remission (<10 on Beck Depression Inventory):
24% CBT, 22% meds, and 42% combination. <br>
<br>
Another medical example is arthroscopic knee surgery. Since I am a
finalist for Worst Knees in an Adult Male, I have an interest in this.
Moseley et al., 2002 NEJM reported that there is no relationship
between procedures done to 'help' the knee and outcome. Some patients
got sham surgery and some got actual clean-up of the meniscus, and
months later there was no difference. Both groups rated their knees as
much improved. People do procedures that they were trained to do.
People do procedures that there is a market for. People do procedures
for which they get paid. <br>
<br>
Here is an inspiring counter example: in 1991, Neil Jacobson published
an editorial in Jl Beh Ther in which he admitted that his Marital
Behavioral Exchange Therapy to improve marriages, did not, in fact,
improve marriages. He abandoned behavioral marital exchange (you change
to make me happy and I will change to make you happy) in favor of John
Gottman's paradigms. I remember my utter astonishment when I read that,
because it is very painful for me to admit I have been wrong. Jacobson
gave 10 years of his highly published life to behavioral exchange and
to renounce that was an act of the highest moral courage. <br>
Lynn<br>
Salt Lake City where we have four inches of brand new snow right
outside my library window and three feet in the mountains, and I have a
full day of work today and tomorrow and cannot go skiing. oh the
horror, the horror. <br>
<br>
Steve Hovland wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid01C534F9.D9821850.shovland@mindspring.com">
<pre wrap="">Interesting about Empirically Validated Treatments.
Once the biochemical issues have been settled, it seems
to me that almost anything you do in the therapeutic
setting helps.
There is also a parallel in medicine, where they are talking
more about outcomes. For example, it is fairly well known
that the effects of angioplasty and bypasses often fade
fairly quickly, so one wonders why they are done in the
first place.
Steve Hovland
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.stevehovland.net">www.stevehovland.net</a>
-----Original Message-----
From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:SMTP:ljohnson@solution-consulting.com">SMTP:ljohnson@solution-consulting.com</a>]
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 6:03 AM
To: The new improved paleopsych list
Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Nanotechnology could promote hydrogen economy
This reminds me of a story my brother told me. He had modeled hydrogen
storage in carbon nanotubes, and at a conference he was asked about it.
He replied that he didn't think it was feasible, that his modeling
studies showed it wasn't. He was skeptical about the possibility of
hydrogen being a transportation fuel. Afterwards, the guys who asked
came up and offered him a grant. (I think they were from LiquideAire or
a competitor) He was surprised and asked why they'd offer him money when
he didn't think that was the right direction. They replied that they
appreciated his honesty. They found that generally the hydrogen field
was full of people who were full of enthusiasm for unrealistic models.
Frank posted recently about how scientists are constrained by unwritten
norms of what is allowed and what is forbidden. It is an ongoing
problem. Groups don't like core beliefs to be challenged, yet these are
precisely what keeps us from seeing the next step. In psychology there
is this big push toward Empirically Validated Treatments, aping physical
medicine, yet Wampold and others have shown conclusively that there is
no significant difference in distinct treatments because it is not the
technique of treatment that actually heals the patient, it is the common
factors. This will be a huge shift of the psychology paradigm, and one
that will come only slowly, and the old true believers die off.
Lynn
PS: RE: Zombies, Paul, did you read Frank's posting of the David Brooks
piece on Schievo from NYT? It was excellent, and points out the ethical
trouble with characterization of brain-disabled people as vegetables
(or, more pejoratively, corpses). It is an ugly business on both sides,
both the pro-life and right-to-die people have some holes in their own
paradigms.
Paul J. Werbos, Dr. wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">At 07:16 AM 3/30/2005, Steve Hovland wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Contact: Carl Blesch
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:cblesch@ur.rutgers.edu">cblesch@ur.rutgers.edu</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:cblesch@ur.rutgers.edu"><mailto:cblesch@ur.rutgers.edu></a>
732-932-7084 x616
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://www.rutgers.edu"><http://www.rutgers.edu></a>
NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. - Say "nanotechnology" and people are
likely
to think of micro machines or zippy computer chips. But in a new twist,
Rutgers scientists are using nanotechnology in chemical reactions that
could provide hydrogen for tomorrow's fuel-cell powered clean energy
vehicles.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
Upon careful analysis of this technological effort, I find it hard to
silence the voice
which responds in only one word:
"nanobrains."
The only really serious scientific puzzles are : "How can an organism
be so stupid?
Is there any hope for survival for an endangered species which thinks
this way?"
It is not obvious that there is even a qualitative difference in
clarity of thinking between the
organisms that want to devote their lives to secure feeding tubes for
corpses and
those who believe in the fundamentalist form of the hydrogen religion
after all these years.
(Re the former, I had a kind of dream image last night of a kind of
church choir
singing a hymn praying to have their zombie back, and a smiling
Frankenstein in the middle...)
Actually, when the purist hydrogen wave was shoved in our faces
particularly hard a couple
of year ago, I did try to think hard about how to give it maximum
possible benefit of the doubt.
And -- biased myself by the VERY heavy political pressures -- I did
even discuss a bit about
the hope for nanotube-based hydrogen storage to solve ONE of the
showstoppers,
in the initial version of my energy paper in the 2003 State of the
Future.
But... there are all the others, and they don't add up.
For example, see the chicken and egg slide at
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/energy_strategy.ppt">www.ieeeusa.org/policy/energy_strategy.ppt</a>
And there are those who pretend that thousand year eggs are real...
We don't HAVE a thousand years here.
Furthermore, cost and efficiency problems are overwhelming --
and, above all, there are three long-term alternatives all far more
sustainable, and near at hand. The purist version of hydrogen economy
is an effective rationalization for going to sleep, when we do have ways
to really solve our problems much closer at hand. One wonders who
supports this out of a desire to keep the rest of us asleep.
And indeed, there are certain folks who exploit other fundamentalist
lunacies
in a similar cynical way.
-----------
There are some perverse nonlinear effects here. The whole is greater
than the sum of the parts,
and the collective level of insanity is often greater than the sum of
the insanities of
individual humans. The previous paragraph gives ONE example of how
this works:
ambitious people with very narrow blinders (focusing so hard in one
direction they ignore what's
coming to eat them out of left field) manipulating other socially
responsive people who
trust the manipulators more than they should. In fact... the total
failure of the
Clinton-Gore energy independence efforts reflect this same phenomenon,
albeit in a slightly different way.
In fact,, I have a very vivid memory from 1994, walking out of Gore's
house (after the first bug
White House PNGV conference)... and hearing an explanation from his
key OSTP
on this... of their policy of maintaining a simple party line at all
times... it was a very conscious
philosophy. Unlike some of the corpse-feeders, they were very very
open to fun rambling discussions..
which is deceptive... because they were not really open to reality.
Good vibes... well...
it reminds me of the issue people have raised about trying to balance
the principles of love and
of truth, and about how people lose it if they chose one over the other.
In the end, if humanity in general is too fuzzy to take out its mental
trash on this issue,
on its own, I have a gut feeling that the problem will be taken care
of anyway... at a price.
At a severe price.
But... the clock ticks...
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">In a paper to be published April 20 in the Journal of the American
Chemical
Society, researchers at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey,
describe how they make a finely textured surface of the metal iridium
that
can be used to extract hydrogen from ammonia, then captured and fed to a
fuel cell. The metal's unique surface consists of millions of
pyramids with
facets as tiny as five nanometers (five billionths of a meter)
across, onto
which ammonia molecules can nestle like matching puzzle pieces. This
sets
up the molecules to undergo complete and efficient decomposition.
"The nanostructured surfaces we're examining are model catalysts,"
said Ted
Madey, State of New Jersey professor of surface science in the physics
department at Rutgers. "They also have the potential to catalyze
chemical
reactions for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries."
A major obstacle to establishing the "hydrogen economy" is the safe and
cost-effective storage and transport of hydrogen fuel. The newly
discovered
process could contribute to the solution of this problem. Handling
hydrogen
in its native form, as a light and highly flammable gas, poses daunting
engineering challenges and would require building a new fuel
distribution
infrastructure from scratch.
By using established processes to bind hydrogen with atmospheric
nitrogen
into ammonia molecules (which are simply one atom of nitrogen and three
atoms of hydrogen), the resulting liquid could be handled much like
today's
gasoline and diesel fuel. Then using nanostructured catalysts based
on the
one being developed at Rutgers, pure hydrogen could be extracted
under the
vehicle's hood on demand, as needed by the fuel cell, and the remaining
nitrogen harmlessly released back into the atmosphere. The carbon-free
nature of ammonia would also make the fuel cell catalyst less
susceptible
to deactivation.
When developing industrial catalysts, scientists and engineers have
traditionally focused on how fast they could drive a chemical
reaction. In
such situations, however, catalysts often drive more than one reaction,
yielding unwanted byproducts that have to be separated out. Also,
traditional catalysts sometimes lose strength in the reaction process.
Madey says that these problems could be minimized by tailoring
nanostructured metal surfaces on supported industrial catalysts,
making new
forms of catalysts that are more robust and selective.
In the journal article, Madey and postdoctoral research fellow Wenhua
Chen
and physics graduate student Ivan Ermanoski describe how a flat
surface of
iridium heated in the presence of oxygen changes its shape to make
uniform
arrays of nanosized pyramids. The structures arise when atomic forces
from
the adjacent oxygen atoms pull metal atoms into a more tightly ordered
crystalline state at temperatures above 300 degrees Celsius (or
approximately 600 degrees Fahrenheit). Different annealing temperatures
create different sized facets, which affect how well the iridium
catalyzes
ammonia decomposition. The researchers are performing additional
studies to
characterize the process more completely.
###
The Rutgers researchers are conducting their work in the university's
Laboratory for Surface Modification, which provides a focus for research
into atomic-level phenomena that occur on the surface of solids. It
involves the overlapping disciplines of physics, chemistry, materials
science and engineering. Their work is supported in part by grants
from the
U. S. Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences.
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</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
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