According to some, the "lack" of women in science and engineering is so critical that Title IX-like protections should be put in place until women are equally represented.

Are you f*cking kidding me? Women have no barriers in science, probably fewer than in any other general field. Over half of students entering medical school this year are women. More than 60% of graduate students in biology and biochemistry and psychology are female. My department chair is a woman. There's no lack of women in science, even at the highest levels.

Yes, you might argue, but the article focuses on Physics and Engineering. And true, there are relatively few women in physics and engineering. But is it possible that maybe women don't choose these fields because they are less interested? Should we force girls into jobs they don't want? It's not like the demands of an academic career in physics are that different from the demands of an academic career in biology or biochemistry. Which even these researchers had to admit was the case:

[T]he institute found that women with physics degrees go on to doctorates, teaching jobs and tenure at the same rate that men do. The gender gap is a result of earlier decisions. While girls make up nearly half of high school physics students, they're less likely than boys to take Advanced Placement courses or go on to a college degree in physics.(emphasis mine)

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven't had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview "a complete waste of time.") But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

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As I am clearly not Aspie.  But the number of questions about sneaking up on people was!

The Aspie quiz:



h/t Jay

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Kids whose parents model responsible drinking at home, including letting the child have small amounts of alcohol in a family setting, are ONE THIRD as likely to develop severe binge-drinking behaviors in their teen and young adult years.

From the Wall Street Journal:

What kind of parents would ever allow their children to drink at home? Doesn't this put youngsters at risk?

The answer to the first question is simple.  Most of the state laws include a specific exemption for children drinking at home during family and religious ceremonies. Observant Jews, for example, traditionally serve children small glasses of wine during Friday night Sabbath ceremonies. Other cultures also begin socializing children into drinking at an early age--including Mediterranean societies such as Italy, Greece and Turkey (and non-Mediterranean societies such as China).

As for the second, two international surveys--one conducted by the World Health Organization--revealed that these Mediterranean countries and Israel had the lowest binge drinking rates among European adolescents.

In societies where children drink with their parents, this typically means giving a kid a small amount of wine or other alcohol, often watered down on special occasions or a family dinner. Many European countries also lower the drinking age for children when they are accompanied by parents. In the United Kingdom, for example, the legal age is 18, but for a family at a restaurant it is 16. In France and Italy, where the legal age is 16, there is no age limit for children drinking with parents.

But what might all of this mean for teen drinking problems in America?

Several studies have shown that the younger kids are when they start to drink, the more likely they are to develop severe drinking problems. But the kind of drinking these studies mean--drinking in the woods to get bombed or at unattended homes--is particularly high risk.

Research published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2004 found that adolescents whose parents permitted them to attend unchaperoned parties where drinking occurred had twice the average binge-drinking rate. But the study also had another, more arresting conclusion: Children whose parents introduced drinking to the children at home were one-third as likely to binge.

"It appears that parents who model responsible drinking behaviors have the potential to teach their children the same," noted Kristie Foley, the principal author of the study. While the phrasing was cautious, the implication of the study's finding needs to be highlighted: Parents who do not introduce children to alcohol in a home setting might be setting them up to become binge drinkers later on. You will not likely hear this at your school's parent drug- and alcohol-awareness nights.

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Babies as young as 6 months are capable of deception:

Behavioural experts have found that infants begin to lie from as young as six months. Simple fibs help to train them for more complex deceptions in later life.

Until now, psychologists had thought the developing brains were not capable of the difficult art of lying until four years old.

Following studies of more than 50 children and interviews with parents, Dr Vasudevi Reddy, of the University of Portsmouth's psychology department, says she has identified seven categories of deception used between six months and three-years-old.

Infants quickly learnt that using tactics such as fake crying and pretend laughing could win them attention. By eight months, more difficult deceptions became apparent, such as concealing forbidden activities or trying to distract parents' attention.

By the age of two, toddlers could use far more devious techniques, such as bluffing when threatened with a punishment.

Dr Reddy said: "Fake crying is one of the earliest forms of deception to emerge, and infants use it to get attention even though nothing is wrong. You can tell, as they will then pause while they wait to hear if their mother is responding, before crying again.

"It demonstrates they're clearly able to distinguish that what they are doing will have an effect. This is essentially all adults do when they tell lies, except in adults it becomes more morally loaded."

It kind of makes me sad though, as I'd prefer to see babies as little innocents, rather than this more cynical view of children as pre-programed manipulation machines.

Oh, and 10 points to the first person who identifies the source of the title....don't Google it, Google has a bunch of sources....

h/t Wired Science

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Researchers at the University of Calgary have discovered that the pregnancy associated hormone prolactin may be responsible for the reduction of MS symptoms usually occurring during pregnancy.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, indicated that prolactin could be used in people to repair damage caused by MS and improve their symptoms.

Pregnant mice had many more myelin-producing cells, known as oligodendrocytes, than virgin female mice of the same age, the study found.

The researchers destroyed myelin around the nerve cells in the mice, as occurs in MS. Two weeks later, the pregnant mice had twice as much new myelin as the other mice. When the scientists injected prolactin into the non-pregnant mice, their myelin similarly was repaired.

"The implications are that prolactin may be a molecule that can be tested in MS patients for stimulating repair," Samuel Weiss, director of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary and senior author of the study, said in an interview.

Prolactin increases in the body during pregnancy and is involved in stimulating milk production among other things.

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This study came out recently, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.  Ok, that's wrong.  On the face, without having read the actual text yet, I disagree with [the media's presentation of] it ENTIRELY.

You see, there's a very important factor that either they've overlooked or the media has chosen not to report....

Let me explain:

First of all, I want to make it clear that I've never experienced that kind of discrimination personally.  As an undergrad, while Caltech had 4 times as many males on campus as females, the Bio department was almost 50-50.  In graduate school, out of about 30 students in my program, 6 were guys.  My advisor was female, too.  So was her postdoctoral advisor.

Here, half of my department is female, including our chair.

But on to my main point:

One thing the study doesn't seem to consider is that women often PREFER to opt out of the higher academic jobs because of the demanding schedule.  We CHOOSE to remain in a comfortable lab, where our schedule is more flexible, we can work with the people we choose to work with, and we have time to be ourselves and actually SEE our families.

This is the elephant in the living room.  Academic Science has many of them.

Sure, a lot of women who are Dr. Shalala's age and even up to 20 years younger had to deal with chauvinist pigs and glass ceilings and all that.  They had to CHOOSE between a career and a family.  Women scientists of MY generation can have both, and are frequently choosing personal fulfillment over professional, in many cases.  I did.  That's why I teach, rather than pursuing a traditional academic career track.

What these older chickies can't stand is the rearrangement of priorities in younger female scientists.  They hate it that we wouldn't follow them blindly through the glass ceiling, that we can stop about a foot lower and say "Thanks, I'm good."  That we refuse to blaze their trail just because it's there.

I'm not naive enough to say that discrimination DOESN'T exist. However, that doesn't mean that gender-based discrimination is the ONLY reason why women don't get the highest jobs in academic science and engineering. And it's naive of THEM to say otherwise.

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don't fucking get me started on these quacks.

Here's what got me:
"Head cases

A few neurological differences between women and men from Louann Brizendine's "The Female Brain":

Thoughts about sex enter women's brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.

Women use 20,000 words per day; men use 7,000 per day.

Women excel at knowing what people are feeling; men have difficulty spotting an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm.

Women remember fights that a man insists never happened.

Just also wanted to point out that it appears that the author of this book is in fact a "real" scientist, who evidently publishes research about hormones and depression.... So perhaps this book is an extended theoretical paper.

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Not that any of you care, but my first multi-million dollar grant application is going out the door this afternoon.  Well, ok, not mine alone, but I am Co-PI.  Holy Crap!

Damn I feel old.  This time last year I was writing my thesis.....

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From Stingflower of new bloggy find Harshly Mellow, who also finds this creepy:

A tenth of two to five-year-olds have a serious psychiatric illness, yet most cases are being missed, warn experts.

The problems go beyond tantrums and bad behaviour and impact negatively on all aspects of an infant's life, the Institute of Psychiatry will hear.

And failure to spot and treat these conditions early is causing unnecessary distress and suffering.

Mental health services need to be geared towards very young children as a matter of urgency, they said.

WTF??? 10% of all two year olds are mentally ill? Riiiight.

Since when is "normal" the 90th percentile in ANY marker of childhood development?

I think what's going on here is simply a misguided consequence of the laudible efforts of pediatric practitioners to identify serious developmental disorders sooner. For example, some studies indicate that the incidence of autism is increasing in some areas over the past 20-30 years. However, it's not clear whether the reported increase is due to more actual new cases of the disorder, or to slightly lessened diagnostic criteria, implemented in an effort to diagnose children at an earlier age so that intervention can be started sooner.

It's entirely plausible that 10% of toddlers display behaviors that mark them as "at risk" of developing personality disorders or ADHD or what have you. However, as psychiatrists have learned repeatedly in following patients predisposed to mood disorder, schizophrenia, etc., the risk of development or even the appearance of frank prodromal symptoms (in the case of Schizophrenia) is no guarantee that the patient will progress to illness. So it's, at the least, reaching a bit to say that 1 out of every 10 young children has a serious disorder.

Which brings me to my other point. Isn't it a bit much to say that one in ten kids has a serious disorder? How serious can it be if it is SO prevalent? Is it possible that our definition of normal is just a tad skewed by the ready availability of drugs and treatments that make our kids fit into tidy little polite boxes? And these are as young as two years old. Ever heard of the terrible twos? Some kids are more terrible than others. Throwing temper tantrums and trying to assert dominance is normal for a toddler or a preschooler. It does not require medication. Just a little time, patience, and firmness from mom and dad. Oh wait. Mom and Dad don't have time anymore, and anyway, being firm with your kids doesn't make friends with them.

Arrgh. This is exactly why I don't want to have kids. I can't be a parent of the state.

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1 This is exactly why I don't want to have kids. I can't be a parent of the state. This is exactly why you should have gives. You can show the state what it means to be a parent.

Posted by: jen at November 28, 2005 12:20 PM (UMVKj)

2 Good grief. gives = kids That is quite the typo.

Posted by: jen at November 28, 2005 12:20 PM (UMVKj)

3 Isn't it a bit much to say that one in ten kids has a serious disorder? Yes, absolutely How serious can it be if it is SO prevalent? Not serious at all. This is simply a putsch by Psychiatrists to get more patients. Probably, aided and abetted by the folks who make Ritalin More troubled kids => more treatment => more drugs => more $$$ The ugly side of science -- scaring people to make $$ off them. Sadly, not so uncommon these days. Barnes, Hank

Posted by: Hank Barnes at November 28, 2005 01:06 PM (hZ5c+)

4 agreed.

Posted by: caltechgirl at November 28, 2005 01:07 PM (/vgMZ)

5 Lordy, if I believed that my kids would be in wards by now.

Posted by: vw bug at November 29, 2005 08:24 AM (Xl/Yt)

6 Oh holy crap! You know what? 2 year old children are manic-depressive ego-centric savants. ALL of them are. That's part of being 2. Unless there's a very distinct trait that can be singled out, I don't believe a minute of that "study". Sorry. Nope. From 2-5, kids are still developing, prone to outbursts of all sorts, and more often than not, just normal kids. Very few need psychiatric intervention. Those who do are in the smallest minority and nowhere near the 10% mark. So says the former pediatric nurse.

Posted by: Da Goddess at December 05, 2005 04:54 PM (nR5ux)

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The other CATIE study was released today in the Americn Journal of Psychiatry. Several researchers I worked with at UNC were involved in this story, and I think it's an important one.

In this study, researchers found that early intervention with antipsychotic treatment after a first episode improved long term outcome.

This has long been a hot button issue in the treatment of Schizophrenia. Prolonged, or multiple breaks are required for a complete diagnosis, and much of the testing that needs to be done should be done without meds on board, so it frequently takes a while for patients to get on a maintenance dose of antipsychotics. Furthermore, if the first episode is not severe, patients may not get treated until their symptoms worsen. This study looks at those patients, and discovers that the earlier treatment starts, te better the outcome.

This is not surprising, since we view Schizophrenia as a developmental disorder that lies dormant until triggered, probably by stress, usually in the second decade of life. If a person is showing a propensity to have a psychotic break and then devolve into frank Schizophrenia, treating them early simply gives us a headstart on their illness. If we can keep a patient from getting too sick to be independent or from losing their cognitive skills, then we've gone a long way towards keeping Schizophrenia from controlling their lives and allowing them to be normal.

The abstract is here. Unfortunately the full study is hidden behind a fee....

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Conventional wisdom in the Schizophrenia game has long held that the newer class of drugs, usually referred to as atypical antipsychotics, is more effective in treating both the positive and negative symptoms of Schizophrenia. Specifically, it is widely known that older drugs, such as Haldol (haloperidol), fail to treat any of the negative symptoms (such as lack of affect and anhedonia).

However, a new study released today in the New England Journal of Medicine (by my former advisor and several of his colleagues that I know well and have worked with) shows that only Zyprexa (olanzapine) is really any better than prior treatments, despite the difficult side effects (weight gain and development of type II diabetes in some patients)....

This study is a product of a long term NIH funded study of early intervention in Schizophrenia by clinical screening and antipsychotic treatment.

You can read the mainstream press article here, the journal article here, and information about the CATIE study here.

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Just finished putting together my LAST lecture for the class. Now all I have to do is write a test for Friday and grade them and the papers that will get turned in then, too.

Yay!!

Here's Today's Neuro Bit:

Schizophrenia means "divided mind". It was first reported in 1896 by Emil Kraepelin, who called it "dementia praecox", and is only marginally better understood today. About 0.1% of the population (1 person in 1000) is schizophrenic. The phrase "Thorazine shuffle" was coined by mental health staff who observed the characteristic rigidity that Thorazine induced in patients who took the drug for many years.

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You asked for it, you got it.

Parkinson's Disease strikes the neurons of the Nigrostriatal pathway, that is, the dopamine-releasing neurons whose cell bodies reside in the Substantia Nigra and synapse in the striatum (also known as the caudate/putamen). You generally have to lose about 90% of those neurons to get any symptoms. Really. The CNS covers its own a$$.

Interestingly enough, Huntington's Disease strikes the reciprocal connections, from the caudate to the SN, and elsewhere.....

Here's a brainstem cross-section of a PD patient and a person who died from something else. Not surprisingly, the substantia nigra is the black band near the bottom-middle.

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