Nitrous Oxide Inhalation as a Fad—Dangers in Uncontrolled Sniffing for Psychedelic Effect

“LAUGHING GAS is the newest thing for kids seeking kicks,” the Stanford Daily reports. “They sniff it.”So begins a news story in the Los Angeles Times of 26 January 1967. The story continues:“It''s the latest way to travel, or so say a growing group of devotees on the campus,” the university student paper said. “It can produce much the same effects as psychedelic drugs, they claim, and it''s cheaper to obtain.”“One student said he buys the gas, nitrous oxide, from a medical supply house. `They think I am anesthetizing rats,'' he explained.“Campus medical authorities said the gas, sniffed `in sufficient amounts... could produce all the states of anesthesia, including the final stage—death.''”     

Social cognition and psychopathology: a critical overview

The philosophical and interdisciplinary debate about the nature of social cognition, and the processes involved, has important implications for psychiatry. On one account, mindreading depends on making theoretical inferences about another person''s mental states based on knowledge of folk psychology, the so-called “theory theory” (TT). On a different account, “simulation theory” (ST), mindreading depends on simulating the other''s mental states within one''s own mental or motor system. A third approach, “interaction theory” (IT), looks to embodied processes (involving movement, gesture, facial expression, vocal intonation, etc.) and the dynamics of intersubjective interactions (joint attention, joint action, and processes not confined to an individual system) in highly contextualized situations to explain social cognition, and disruptions of these processes in some psychopathological conditions. In this paper, we present a brief summary of these three theoretical frameworks (TT, ST, IT). We then focus on impaired social abilities in autism and schizophrenia from the perspective of the three approaches. We discuss the limitations of such approaches in the scientific studies of these and other pathologies, and we close with a short reflection on the future of the field. In this regard we argue that, to the extent that TT, ST and IT offer explanations that capture different (limited) aspects of social cognition, a pluralist approach might be best.     

Buffeted by harsh economic winds,medical schools turn a wary eye to the future

All parts of Canada''s health care system are facing fiscal pressures these days, but they are particularly great at Canada''s medical schools. However, Dr. David Hawkins of the Association of Canadian Medical Colleges is optimistic that all 16 of Canada''s medical schools will remain open, mainly because of the huge impact they have on health care in their local communities. “We don''t just turn out students — we raise the standard of health care in a whole community,” he says.     

Coumarin Therapy and Platelet Aggregation

Platelet aggregation has been related to blood coagulation studies in patients on nicoumalone, a coumarin anticoagulant. Aggregation studies were performed by means of Chandler''s tube and the adenosine diphosphate (A.D.P.)-induced optical density method. Platelet aggregation in Chandler''s tube has been shown to be quite different from A.D.P. aggregation and to be dependent on the “intrinsic” (blood) clotting system. When the intrinsic system was depressed by coumarin anticoagulant, aggregation was delayed in Chandler''s tube, but patients with a predominantly “extrinsic” (tissue) system defect gave normal results even when their prothrombin time was excessively prolonged. In contrast there was an increased response to A.D.P. in the anticoagulated patients.The study emphasizes the different mechanisms of platelet aggregation, which we have referred to as coagulation-induced and A.D.P.-induced aggregation. It also shows the limitations of routine control of oral anticoagulants by prothrombin time alone, as the coagulation-induced platelet aggregation appears to be quantitatively related to the overall level of clotting factors in the intrinsic system and independent of the extrinsic system.     

Patients' accounts of being removed from their general practitioner's list: qualitative study

Objective To explore patients'' accounts of being removed from a general practitioner''s list.Design Qualitative analysis of semistructured interviews.Setting Patients'' homes in Leicestershire.Participants 28 patients who had recently been removed from a general practitioner''s list.Results The removed patients gave an account of themselves as having genuine illnesses needing medical care. In putting their case that their removal was unjustified, patients were concerned to show that they were “good” patients who complied with the rules that they understood to govern the doctor-patient relationship: they tried to cope with their illness and follow medical advice, used general practice services “appropriately,” were uncomplaining, and were polite with doctors. Removed patients also used their accounts to characterise the removing general practitioner as one who broke the lay rules of the doctor-patient relationship. These “bad” general practitioners were rude, impersonal, uncaring, and clinically incompetent and lied to patients. Patients felt very threatened by being removed from their general practitioner''s list; they experienced removal as an attack on their right to be an NHS patient, as deeply distressing, and as stigmatising.Conclusions Removal is an overwhelmingly negative and distressing experience for patients. Many of the problems encountered by removed patients may be remediable through general practices having an explicit policy on removal and procedures in place to help with “difficult” patients.     

Commentary: Personal Renewal

After John Gardner''s presentation on “Self-Renewal” to THE WESTERN JOURNAL OF MEDICINE Editors'' Meeting, ^* Joseph Murphy, MD, Special Editor for Wyoming, asked the former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, “Where are you in your life''s cycle?” Dr Gardner, who is 80 years old, answered, “When Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, was in his 90s, he was asked a similar question and said, `I''m like a race horse cantering along after the race is over, cooling down.'' Well, I''m nowhere near cantering! I''m still in the race, pushing the world.” race, pushing the world.”John Gardner, who received his undergraduate degree from Stanford and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, taught at the college level for several years before he joined the Carnegie Foundation. As president of Carnegie Corporation and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, he began to “push the world” toward education and in 1964 received the country''s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has also pushed it toward political reform by founding Common Cause, toward grass-roots political action by founding the Urban Coalition, toward leadership training by founding the White House Fellows program, and toward volunteerism by founding the Independent Sector (a coalition of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations and foundations). His books, including Excellence, Self-Renewal, No Easy Victories, and On Leadership, have pushed readers to new understanding of themselves and of organizations to higher levels of creativity and energy to get important work done. His current research focuses on discovering and defining the characteristics of healthy, vital communities. His call to “keep on keeping on,” indeed, to push the world, leads to constructive change. Active people become effective people, infused with the energy and optimism that good hard work inspires. I think you will find this paper as invigorating to read as it was to hear.     

When Does Reward Maximization Lead to Matching Law?

What kind of strategies subjects follow in various behavioral circumstances has been a central issue in decision making. In particular, which behavioral strategy, maximizing or matching, is more fundamental to animal''s decision behavior has been a matter of debate. Here, we prove that any algorithm to achieve the stationary condition for maximizing the average reward should lead to matching when it ignores the dependence of the expected outcome on subject''s past choices. We may term this strategy of partial reward maximization “matching strategy”. Then, this strategy is applied to the case where the subject''s decision system updates the information for making a decision. Such information includes subject''s past actions or sensory stimuli, and the internal storage of this information is often called “state variables”. We demonstrate that the matching strategy provides an easy way to maximize reward when combined with the exploration of the state variables that correctly represent the crucial information for reward maximization. Our results reveal for the first time how a strategy to achieve matching behavior is beneficial to reward maximization, achieving a novel insight into the relationship between maximizing and matching.     

Doctor,you're in tobacco sales!

The director of British Columbia''s Doctors'' Stop-Smoking Project says that, whether they recognize it or not, doctors have the best and most competitive position within the tobacco industry because they have the best product line. Dr. Frederic Bass says physicians'' products—health and freedom from addiction—will win against the competition, which can offer only smoke, addiction to nicotine and ill health. “We offer the better deal,” he says, “but are we selling like we could? That''s the issue.”     

CMA brief offers suggestions as federal commission studies country's blood-gathering system

The CMA hopes the Commission of Inquity on the Blood System, chaired by Mr. Justice Horace Krever, “will restore faith in a system that is essential for the health and safety of all Canadians.” However, the cost implications any recommendations may have for the health care system must also be taken into consideration. The CMA made several recommendations in response to the commission''s interim report.     

Human Collective Intelligence under Dual Exploration-Exploitation Dilemmas

The exploration-exploitation dilemma is a recurrent adaptive problem for humans as well as non-human animals. Given a fixed time/energy budget, every individual faces a fundamental trade-off between exploring for better resources and exploiting known resources to optimize overall performance under uncertainty. Colonies of eusocial insects are known to solve this dilemma successfully via evolved coordination mechanisms that function at the collective level. For humans and other non-eusocial species, however, this dilemma operates within individuals as well as between individuals, because group members may be motivated to take excessive advantage of others'' exploratory findings through social learning. Thus, even though social learning can reduce collective exploration costs, the emergence of disproportionate “information scroungers” may severely undermine its potential benefits. We investigated experimentally whether social learning opportunities might improve the performance of human participants working on a “multi-armed bandit” problem in groups, where they could learn about each other''s past choice behaviors. Results showed that, even though information scroungers emerged frequently in groups, social learning opportunities reduced total group exploration time while increasing harvesting from better options, and consequentially improved collective performance. Surprisingly, enriching social information by allowing participants to observe others'' evaluations of chosen options (e.g., Amazon''s 5-star rating system) in addition to choice-frequency information had a detrimental impact on performance compared to the simpler situation with only the choice-frequency information. These results indicate that humans groups can handle the fundamental “dual exploration-exploitation dilemmas” successfully, and that social learning about simple choice-frequencies can help produce collective intelligence.     

"Like Owner,Like Dog": Correlation between the Owner's Attachment Profile and the Owner-Dog Bond

During recent years, several studies have revealed that human-dog relationships are based on a well-established and complex bond. There is now evidence suggesting that the dog–human affectional bond can be characterized as an “attachment”. The present study investigated possible association between the owners'' attachment profile assessed throughout a new semi-projective test (the 9 Attachment Profile) and the owner-dog attachment bond evaluated using a modified version of those used in studying human infants: Ainsworth''s “strange situation”. The findings represented the first evidence for the presence of a correlation between the owners'' attachment profile and the owner-dog attachment bond throughout procedure and behavioural analyses involving controlled observations.     

Role of Platelets in Hemostasis and Thrombosis

Platelets interact with the coagulation factors in a complex way to arrest bleeding or generate thrombi. Recently, the platelet''s relationship to endothelial alteration and atheroma production has received renewed attention. At present, tests of platelet function better define “hypocoagulable” rather than “hypercoagulable” states.     

The Cultivation of Bt Corn Producing Cry1Ac Toxins Does Not Adversely Affect Non-Target Arthropods

Transgenic corn producing Cry1Ac toxins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) provides effective control of Asian corn borer, Ostrinia furnacalis (Guenée), and thus reduces insecticide applications. However, whether Bt corn exerts undesirable effects on non-target arthropods (NTAs) is still controversial. We conducted a 2-yr study in Shangzhuang Agricultural Experiment Station to assess the potential impact of Bt corn on field population density, biodiversity, community composition and structure of NTAs. On each sampling date, the total abundance, Shannon''s diversity index, Pielou''s evenness index and Simpson''s diversity index were not significantly affected by Bt corn as compared to non-Bt corn. The “sampling dates” had a significant effect on these indices, but no clear tendencies related to “Bt corn” or “sampling dates X corn variety” interaction were recorded. Principal response curve analysis of variance indicated that Bt corn did not alter the distribution of NTAs communities. Bray-Curtis dissimilarity and distance analysis showed that Cry1Ac toxin exposure did not increase community dissimilarities between Bt and non-Bt corn plots and that the evolution of non-target arthropod community was similar on the two corn varieties. The cultivation of Bt corn failed to show any detrimental evidence on the density of non-target herbivores, predators and parasitoids. The composition of herbivores, predators and parasitoids was identical in Bt and non-Bt corn plots. Taken together, results from the present work support that Bt corn producing Cry1Ac toxins does not adversely affect NTAs.     

Pathological States and Criminal Responsibility

The doctor is embarrassed in court when asked to testify to the effects of illness on a defendant''s capability “of appreciating the nature and quality of an act or omission or of knowing that an act or omission is wrong”. The source of his difficulty is traced to the legal concepts of “guilt”, “crime” and “punishment” which imply a legal view of man at variance with our modern biological view. To abolish this discrepancy we need not accept a medical model for criminal law where “crime” is analogous to “disease”, and “punishment” to “treatment”. A pragmatic approach to the handling of the criminal could exclude the notions of “guilt” and “punishment” and yet fulfil the rational goals of protecting society from the criminal and of compensating his victims.     

The Effect of Framing and Normative Messages in Building Support for Climate Policies

Deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are required to mitigate climate change. However, there is low willingness amongst the public to prioritise climate policies for reducing emissions. Here we show that the extent to which Australians are prepared to reduce their country''s CO₂ emissions is greater when the costs to future national income are framed as a “foregone-gain”—incomes rise in the future but not by as much as in the absence of emission cuts—rather than as a “loss”—incomes decrease relative to the baseline expected future levels (Studies 1 & 2). The provision of a normative message identifying Australia as one of the world''s largest CO₂ emitters did not increase the amount by which individuals were prepared to reduce emissions (Study 1), whereas a normative message revealing the emission policy preferences of other Australians did (Study 2). The results suggest that framing the costs of reducing emissions as a smaller increase in future income and communicating normative information about others'' emission policy preferences are effective methods for leveraging public support for emission cuts.     

Affective Video Retrieval: Violence Detection in Hollywood Movies by Large-Scale Segmental Feature Extraction

Without doubt general video and sound, as found in large multimedia archives, carry emotional information. Thus, audio and video retrieval by certain emotional categories or dimensions could play a central role for tomorrow''s intelligent systems, enabling search for movies with a particular mood, computer aided scene and sound design in order to elicit certain emotions in the audience, etc. Yet, the lion''s share of research in affective computing is exclusively focusing on signals conveyed by humans, such as affective speech. Uniting the fields of multimedia retrieval and affective computing is believed to lend to a multiplicity of interesting retrieval applications, and at the same time to benefit affective computing research, by moving its methodology “out of the lab” to real-world, diverse data. In this contribution, we address the problem of finding “disturbing” scenes in movies, a scenario that is highly relevant for computer-aided parental guidance. We apply large-scale segmental feature extraction combined with audio-visual classification to the particular task of detecting violence. Our system performs fully data-driven analysis including automatic segmentation. We evaluate the system in terms of mean average precision (MAP) on the official data set of the MediaEval 2012 evaluation campaign''s Affect Task, which consists of 18 original Hollywood movies, achieving up to .398 MAP on unseen test data in full realism. An in-depth analysis of the worth of individual features with respect to the target class and the system errors is carried out and reveals the importance of peak-related audio feature extraction and low-level histogram-based video analysis.     

RETROLENTAL FIBROPLASIA—Blindness in Infants of Low Weight at Birth

Retrolental fibroplasia is today the principal cause of blindness in children of preschool age, exceeding all other causes combined. The disease occurs in infants of low weight at birth, commonly those born prematurely. The incidence of the disease is rising at an alarming rate. Vitamin E deficiency, corticotropin (ACTH) deficiency, the use of cow''s milk in place of mother''s milk, and improper oxygenation have been suggested as etiologic factors but the cause remains a mystery. Often the incidence is high in institutions in which maximal care is given premature infants.Clinically, the disease advances through an “active” phase during which regression is possible, and a “subsiding” or “cicatricial” phase which terminates with the formation of a disorganized opaque mass behind the lens. The earliest manifestations are noted in the fundi. Hemorrhages, neovascularization, transudation commencing in the periphery, and retinal separation contribute to the formation of the characteristic retrolental membrane. The diagnosis may be made when the retrolental membrane is observed in the eye of an infant whose weight at birth was low. Differential diagnosis is required occasionally.Thus far, no form of therapy has prevented or reversed the pathologic changes successfully. Use of vitamin E, corticotropin and mother''s milk has not influenced the incidence of the disease. Avoidance of premature delivery if possible is indicated.