A study by three Kansas State University graduate students finds that the 18- to 24-year-old demographic became more politically active during the 2008 U.S. election season through the use of new media, but that the young adults were not necessarily more knowledgeable about politics. The K-State study examined young adults' media consumption and the effects of new media on their political knowledge and political activism. While the study showed that 18- to 24-year-olds were actively engaging in politics through media such as blogs and YouTube, their involvement did not increase their knowledge.

The K-State researchers conducting the study, all master's students in journalism and mass communications, were Keunyeong Kim, and Sookyong Kim, both from Manhattan, and Chance York, Wamego. William Adams, K-State professor of journalism and mass communications, was the project adviser. The research was presented at the 2009 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention. "Politicians in general are so reliant on political polling, but politicians are not examining how much the voter knows about the issues they're voting on," York said.

The study targeted the 18- to 24-year-old demographic and examined the group's usage of new media. The researchers surveyed more than 160 undergraduate students in February about their use of both traditional media sources, including radio campaign commercials, and new media sources, like blogs, to obtain information about presidential candidates and their campaign issues. "We were trying to find what information sources 18- to 24-year olds were looking at and how that might have affected their political activism and their level of political knowledge," York said.

The survey's measures for political activism included yes or no questions that dealt with traditional and online forms of political involvement. The traditional methods of activism included volunteering for a presidential candidate's campaign or attending a candidate's rally, while online forms of involvement included checking a presidential candidate's campaign Web site. The measure for political knowledge was similar to a current events quiz with questions like the name of the U.S. secretary of defense. The survey also measured the demographics of the students, including their political affiliation and ideology and whether they voted in the 2008 election.

"We found that the students were really politically active," York said. "They talked about the campaigns with their friends, and a lot of people got online on a social networking site to talk about the campaigns. Not many wrote blogs, but a considerable amount kept up with blogs." The study also found that most students were not politically knowledgeable, York said. For instance, many students did not know what Guantanamo Bay was; some said it was a Caribbean resort.

There also was a set of people that were both politically active and knowledgeable, and there was a high correlation between those two variables and voting. "People who were actually voting were both active and knowledgeable, and that wasn't affected by whether the student was a Democrat or Republican, or liberal or conservative," York said.

Additionally, the study indicated that among the 18- to 24-year-old demographic, the individuals who voted were not the ones using new media to obtain political information. The researchers also looked at the different types of new media, such as those that would be considered "gatekeepers," where an editorial member controls the flow of knowledge, and "gatewatchers," where information flows more freely.

The study showed that the more people used new media that would be considered "gatewatched," such as blogs, the more likely they were to be politically active -- but not politically knowledgeable. New media that would be "gatekept," such as online news articles, had less of an impact on political activism and no significant effect on political knowledge. Survey respondents' use of traditional media did not play a significant role in their political activism or political knowledge.

York said the study has limitations, particularly since the students were not selected from a random sample. "What we can't say is that this is true for all 18-to 24-year-olds, and statistically we can't make a significant inference," York said. "However, there is not a lot of research in this area, and so trying to forge out that path is a good start."

"[...] the common strategies include dismissing as "junk science" peer-reviewed studies showing a link between their products and disease; paying scientists to produce pro-industry studies; sowing doubt in the public's mind about the harm caused by their products; intensive marketing to children and adolescents; frequently rolling out supposedly "safer" products and vowing to regulate their own industries; denying the addictive nature of their products; and lobbying with massive resources to thwart regulatory action."

Big Food Is Copying Big Tobacco's Disinformation Tactics, How Many Will Die This Time?
By Fen Montaigne
Posted 11 April 2009 on AlterNet

“In psychiatry no one knows the causes of anything, so classification can be driven by all sorts of factors” — political, social and financial. “What you have in the end,” Mr. Shorter [a historian of psychiatry] said, “is this process of sorting the deck of symptoms into syndromes, and the outcome all depends on how the cards fall.”

The DSM-V is expected to fall into place in 2011-2012.

The article, Psychiatrists Revise the Book of Human Troubles, can be found at the New York Times online

Albert Bandura, the David Starr Jordan Professor, has been awarded the 2008 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology, a $200,000 prize. He was selected from among 31 nominations in five countries for his groundbreaking work in social cognitive theory and self-efficacy.

Bandura's ideas have helped define the way today's psychologists understand the mind and human behavior, the judges said. He was the first to prove that self-efficacy, a belief in one's capabilities, affects the tasks one chooses, how much effort is put into them and how one feels while doing them. Bandura also found that people learn not only as a result of their own beliefs and expectations but also by "modeling" or observing others, an idea that led to the development of modern social cognition theory. "He has had enormous impact not only on psychology, but on other disciplines as well," the award committee stated. In 2002, a survey in the Review of General Psychology ranked Bandura as the fourth most eminent psychologist of the 20th century, behind B. F. Skinner, Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud.

The Grawemeyer Foundation at the University of Louisville in Kentucky annually awards $1 million—divided equally into five prizes—for accomplishments in psychology, music composition, ideas improving world order, education and religion. The prize recognizes powerful ideas or creative works in the sciences, arts and humanities. Bandura will receive the award next spring and deliver a public lecture about his work in Louisville.

Charles Grawemeyer, who died in 1993, was an industrialist, entrepreneur and University of Louisville alumnus.

Stanford Report, 5 December 2007

Albert Ellis, who developed Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), died on 24 July 2007 at the age of 93. He will be greatly missed.

Albert Ellis Institute's Tribute
Ellis' last interview at Prospect

Laws of physics, math debunk Hollywood portrayals of ghosts, vampires

As the weather cools and Halloween approaches, chilling creaks in the stairs, bloodcurdling screams from the attic and other paranormal activity become more believable -- but not to UCF physics professor Costas Efthimiou.

The laws of physics and math debunk popular myths about ghosts and vampires, according to a paper published by Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi, a UCF graduate now studying at Cornell University.

Using Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion, Efthimiou demonstrates that ghosts would not be able to walk and pass through walls. Basic math disproves the legend of humans turning into vampires after they are bitten, Efthimiou explains, because the entire human population in 1600 would have been wiped out in less than three years.

"These popular myths make for a lot of Halloween fun and great movies with special effects, but they just don't hold up to the strict tests of science," Efthimiou said.

In movies such as "Ghost," starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, ghosts often walk like humans, pass through walls and pick up objects. But that portrayal cannot be accurate, Efthimiou says. For ghosts to have the ability to walk like humans, they would need to put a force upon the floor, which would exert an equal and opposite force in return. But ghosts' ability to pass through walls and have humans walk right through them demonstrates that they cannot apply any force.

Movies such as "Blade," featuring Wesley Snipes, suggest that vampires feed on human blood and that once a human has been bitten, he or she turns into a vampire and begins feeding on other humans. To disprove the existence of vampires, Efthimiou relied on a basic math principle known as geometric progression.

Efthimiou supposed that the first vampire arrived Jan. 1, 1600, when the human population was 536,870,911. Assuming that the vampire fed once a month and the victim turned into a vampire, there would be two vampires and 536,870,910 humans on Feb. 1. There would be four vampires on March 1 and eight on April 1. If this trend continued, all of the original humans would become vampires within two and a half years and the vampires' food source would disappear.

Efthimiou did not take into consideration mortality rates, which would have increased the speed at which the human population would have been vanquished. And even factoring in a birth rate would not change the outcome.

"In the long run, humans cannot survive under these conditions, even if our population were doubling each month," Efthimiou said. "And doubling is clearly way beyond the human capacity of reproduction."

Efthimiou also provides a practical explanation for "voodoo zombiefication," which suggests that zombies "come about by a voodoo hex being placed by a sorcerer on one of his enemies." He reviewed the case of a Haitian adolescent who was pronounced dead by a local doctor after a week of dramatic convulsions.

After the boy was buried, he returned in an incoherent state, and Haitians pronounced that a sorcerer had raised him from the dead in the state of a zombie.

Science, however, has a less-supernatural explanation. A highly-toxic substance called tetrodotoxin is found in a breed of puffer fish native to Haitian waters. Contact with this substance generally results in a rapid death. However, in some cases, the right dose of the toxin will result in a state that mimics death and slows vital signs to a level that is unable to be measured. Eventually, the victim snaps out of the death-like coma and returns to his or her regular condition.

Scientific analysis has shown that oxygen deprivation is consistent with the boy's brain damage and his incoherent state.

"It would seem that zombiefication is nothing more than a skillful act of poisoning," Efthimiou said.

23 October 2006
University of Central Florida

Cosgrove, L., Krimsky, S., Vijayaraghavan, M. & Schneider, L. (2006). Financial Ties between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 75, 154-160.

ABSTRACT
Background: Increasing attention has been given to the transparency of potential conflicts of interest in clinical medicine and biomedical sciences, particularly in journal publishing and science advisory panels. The authors examined the degree and type of financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry of panel members responsible for revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Methods: By using multimodal screening techniques the authors investigated the financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry of 170 panel members who contributed to the diagnostic criteria produced for the DSM-IV and the DSM-IV-TR.

Results: Of the 170 DSM panel members 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. One hundred percent of the members of the panels on 'Mood Disorders' and 'Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders' had financial ties to drug companies. The leading categories of financial interest held by panel members were research funding (42%), consultancies (22%) and speakers bureau (16%).

Conclusions: Our inquiry into the relationships between DSM panel members and the pharmaceutical industry demonstrates that there are strong financial ties between the industry and those who are responsible for developing and modifying the diagnostic criteria for mental illness. The connections are especially strong in those diagnostic areas where drugs are the first line of treatment for mental disorders. Full disclosure by DSM panel members of their financial relationships with for-profit entities that manufacture drugs used in the treatment of mental illness is recommended.

Copyright © 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel

Ellis kicked off board of institute he founded
A man who was once proclaimed the second most influential psychologist in the past 100 years has been summarily dumped from the board of the psychotherapy institute he founded nearly a half-century ago.

By Richard E. Gill, Assistant Editor
The National Psychologist
November/December 2005