The University of Montreal finds that pretty much all men consume pornography, mostly online, averaging 20 to 40 minutes a week, and without resulting "pathological" behavior.
(Credit: bella731/Flickr)Pornography has long been considered to be one of the main motivators of major technological inventions, from the camera to the worldwide Web. Its effects on human health and sexuality have also been, and likely will always be, hotly debated. (The pun is irresistible.)
But new research out of the University of Montreal suggests that pornography is so widely digested, and with such a seemingly low correlation to "pathological" behavior, that it is grossly over-demonized. The research is funded by the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Family Violence and Violence Against Women.
Simon Louis Lajeunesse, a postdoctoral student and professor at the School of Social Work, set out to examine the effects of pornography on men, which would involve studying men in their 20s who've never consumed pornography. "We couldn't find any," he says.
Still at an early stage of the study, Lajeunesse has so far recruited 20 heterosexual male university students who, as consumers of pornography, are representative of, well, heterosexual male university students. The objective of the study, he says, "is to observe the impact of pornography on the sexuality of men, and how it shapes their perception of men and women."
Subjects shared their sexual history, beginning with their first experience with pornography, which for most boys happens by the age of 10. The research so far shows that 90 percent of pornography is consumed online and 10 percent through video stores. On average, men who are single watch porn about three times a week for about 40 minutes, while men who are in relationships watch about 1.7 times a week for about 20 minutes.
All test subjects report that they support gender equality, and that they feel victimized by rhetoric that demonizes pornography.
"Pornography hasn't changed their perception of women or their relationship which they all want as harmonious and fulfilling as possible," Lajeunesse says. "Those who could not live out their fantasy in real life with their partner simply set aside the fantasy. The fantasy is broken in the real world and men don't want their partner to look like a porn star." (Naomi Wolf has famously argued the opposite.)
Even though he has only interviewed 20 men so far, Lajeunesse says his work is already refuting pornography's role in changing sexual behavior. "If pornography had the impact that many claim it has, you would just have to show heterosexual films to a homosexual to change his sexual orientation."
There are a few obvious problems with this study, beyond its sample population being 20. Lajeunesse is relying on his subjects to report honestly about behavior that, when actually perverse, might rarely be admitted to. Also, there is the question of what should be defined as perverse or deviant. And finally, measuring the effects of porn on sexual behavior before it became so widely available online compared to after seems downright impossible.
But still, if watching porn is so widespread, and I have every reason to believe it is, Lajeunesse may have a point about its effects being over-hyped, unless we are all closet basketcases. Whether he will ever be able to prove this definitively, though, is unlikely.
Also of note is that this study only sets out to investigate the effects of porn on men. The effect on women, their sexuality, and how they view their own bodies and the desires of their partners is another story altogether.
LONDON--The head of the U.N.'s panel of climate experts rejected accusations of bias on Thursday, saying a "Climategate" row in no way undermined evidence that humans are to blame for global warming.
Climate change skeptics have seized on a series of e-mails written by specialists in the field, accusing them of colluding to suppress data which might have undermined their arguments.
The e-mails, some written as long as 13 years ago, were stolen from a British university by unknown hackers and spread rapidly across the Internet.
But Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stood by his panel's 2007 findings, called the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). "This private communication in no way damages the credibility of the AR4 findings," he told Reuters in an e-mail exchange.
This report helped to underpin a global climate response which included this week carbon emissions targets proposed by the United States and China, and won the IPCC a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
The e-mails hacked from Britain's University of East Anglia last week showed scientists made snide comments about climate skeptics, and revealed exchanges about how to present the data to make the global warming argument look convincing.
In one e-mail, confirmed by the university as genuine, a scientist jokingly referred to ways of ensuring papers which doubted established climate science did not appear in the AR4.
Pachauri said a laborious selection process, using only articles approved by other scientists, called peer review, and then subsequently approving these by committee had prevented distortion.
"The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments," he added in a written statement to Reuters.
"There is, therefore, no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer reviewed."
"This thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental."
In another e-mail, according to news accounts, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." The revelation of the e-mails was more embarrassing than serious fodder for doubts about the causes of, or basis for climate change, scientists responded this week.
"It is unfortunate that an illegal act of accessing private e-mail communications between scientists who have been involved as authors in IPCC assessments in the past has led to several questions and concerns," said Pachauri.
Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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Shareable Ink is hoping to popularize a camera-in-a-pen that wirelessly transfers text written on paper to a remote database to better track such data as glucose levels.
(Credit: Shareable Ink)It all started when anesthesiologist Vernon Huang wanted to figure out a better way to streamline his billing. How could he bridge the gap between what's written on paper and what must be entered into an electronic database?
Huang, who's clocked in time as a senior manager for health care markets at Apple, designed the application for a digital pen whose tiny camera embedded right next to the ink cartridge captures every stroke of the written word on film and whose images are uploaded wirelessly and automatically to a remote database.
He knew such an invention has a range of applications well beyond billing, and founded Shareable Ink (headquartered in Newton, Mass., with a branch in San Mateo, Calif.). Medgadget caught up with Huang at TedMed and posted a shaky but informative demonstration:
There is, of course, competition. ... Read more
Insurance companies want us to be healthy. Really, they do. They have our interests at heart, and they defend those interests with an unusual zeal. This is why I am wondering which details might be missing from the tale of Natalie Blanchard.
According to the Associated Press, Blanchard, a 29-year-old IBM employee from Bromont, Quebec, was suffering from depression and took time away from work, relying on sick-leave benefits from her insurer, Manulife Financial.
The monthly payments were suddenly halted. When she called Manulife to ask why, she says she was told that it had espied photos on her Facebook page that showed her cheerful. Ergo, the argument allegedly went, she was able to work. Which led to the second ergo: no more payments.
The pictures, about which I am sure you are already wondering, were of her at a show featuring those tensing torsos, the Chippendales, as well as at a birthday party and on a beach holiday.
Depression is a nasty business. Cures are not exactly logical. And Blanchard says she went on three trips, each of a four-day duration, after consulting with her psychiatrist.
Manulife, while confirming (footage from Sky News embedded here) that it does use social-networking sites to, well, check up on its customers, also said, "We would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on Web sites such as Facebook."
Perhaps you, too, have some questions. What sort of a life is it when you spend your days trawling social-networking sites to sniff around your customers' personal existence? How is it that Manulife observed Blanchard's photos? Did she leave her Facebook page entirely open, or could it be that she had her insurance agent as one of her Facebook friends? Was she, indeed, already under suspicion before the Facebook trawling began?
December 8, this case will be heard in the Quebec Superior Court. Surely, we will learn a little more about Natalie Blanchard and a little more about Manulife. Perhaps Facebook could provide a live feed from the proceedings?
Add another robot to the list of helping bots for seniors. A robot named Charlie rolled into a New Zealand retirement village on Monday to take residents' vital signs, deliver their medication reminders, and call for assistance if they fall.
Charlie's trial stint at Selwyn Retirement Village in Auckland's Point Chevalier is, in part, a response to a University of Auckland study exploring seniors' attitudes toward robots.
The study--part of a three-year "HealthBots" collaboration by the University of Auckland and Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute--collated the opinions of Selwyn Retirement Village residents, their families, and staff on what tasks health care robots could perform and what the mechanical helpers should look like.
Results showed respondents felt most comfortable with robots taking vital signs such as blood pressure, calling for help, lifting heavy objects, cleaning, and making phone calls to a doctor or nurse. They did not identify personal care, medical advice, and assessing emotions as tasks they'd like to see taken over by robots.
Posing with Charlie the robot are HealthBots team members (from left) Rebecca Stafford, Bruce MacDonald, and Elizabeth Broadbent.
(Credit: University of Auckland)As far as physical appearance, residents and staff indicated they preferred a "middle-age robot" with a clear voice, though they didn't have a preference for male or female features. The robot shouldn't be too human-like, they suggested, with some residents explicitly saying they'd rather be tended to by a robot without a face. The preferred design was silver and around 4 feet tall, so the robot was not too imposing, with wheels and a screen.
Enter Charlie, which pretty much fits that description. ... Read more
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Rom Houben has been trapped in a series of worst nightmares, including trying for 23 years to alert those around him that he was not in a coma. A new report suggests he's not alone in his experience.
Neurologist Steven Laureys used state-of-the-art brain scanning techniques to study Houben's cerebral cortex.
(Credit: Universite de Liege)In 1983, Belgian engineering student and martial arts enthusiast Houben, then 20, was in a car accident that was thought to have left him in a vegetative state. Doctors relied on the widely-used Glasgow Coma Scale, assessing his eyes, verbal, and motor responses. What they failed to notice was that Houben was actually conscious--but completely paralyzed.
"I screamed, but there was no one to hear," he says in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. Three years ago, neurologist Steven Laureys used modern scanning techniques to discover that Houben's cerebral cortex was, in fact, functioning. (The doctor has only just now made Houben's story public.)
Houben, who communicates via a computer with a special keyboard activated with the slightest movement of his right hand, is now 46. He has spent more than half his life trapped in his own body, and says he only survived this excruciating existence by dreaming himself away. In the interview, this is what he typed:
I am called Rom. I am not dead. The nurses came, they patted me, they sometimes took my hand, and I heard them say "no hope." I meditated, I dreamed my life away--it was all I could do. I don't want to blame anyone--it wouldn't do any good. But I owe my life to my family. Everyone else gave up.
I studied what happened around me as if it were a tiny piece of world drama, the bizarre peculiarities of the other patients in the common room, the entry of the doctors into my room, the gossip of the nurses who were not embarrassed to speak about their boyfriends in front of "the extinct one." That made me an expert on relationships.
According to Laureys, Houben's case may be far more common than we'd like to think. The doctor, who leads the Coma Science Group and Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital, says that while Houben's doctors were "not good," he's not sure better ones using this same coma scale would have detected brain activity either:
In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury. About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health. But an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people a year remain trapped in an intermediate stage--they go on living without ever coming back again.
In his paper, Laureys writes that in about 40 percent of "vegetative state" cases he has analyzed, current brain scanning techniques reveal signs of varying levels of consciousness. A case is being made, it seems, to stop relying on the Glasgow Coma Scale and start looking more closely at brain scanning images.
When a caregiver leaves a patient's hospital room, or when that patient is transferred from one ward to another, it can be tricky to monitor vital signs without interruption. What if that data all fit on one screen in the palm of the caregiver's hand?
The 120-year-old German medical technology company Drager has built the Infinity Acute Care System to constantly improve hospital processes and procedures, and the suite's new Infinity M540, released at Medica 2009, is designed to make the continuous reading and monitoring of vital signs much easier.
The monitor travels with the patient from one room to the next (i.e. emergency room to intensive care), and a caregiver can remove it from its dock with just one hand.
Even when removed, the vital signs are recorded and displayed without interruption, and when placed back on the docking system--even if that station has moved to a different ward--it backfills all data recorded since being removed from the dock. That data goes to the Medical Cockpit, the central control and viewing unit of the Infinity Acute Care System.
Probably the coolest feature of the M540 is that, when docked, it automatically adjusts to ward-specific settings via the Medical Cockpit, so that as it travels throughout a hospital it displays whichever vital signs have been deemed relevant to that ward.
Another handy feature is that the monitor's display auto-flips when turned 180 degrees, so that it can be positioned on either side of a patient without disrupting cable connectors.
"In view of increasingly complex clinical scenarios, having comprehensive patient information is becoming a key factor in modern patient care," says Jürgen Peters, director of the Clinic for Anesthesiology and Intensive Care at the University Hospital of Essen. The clinic is the first in the world to install M540 monitors, according to Drager.
The seamless monitoring and recording of a patient's vital signs seems like an obviously important task to get right; in an age where we can virtualize our desktops and roll dice with a flick of our cell phones, it's about time the technology for this catches up.
You may not know it, but deep within the ivory towers of hospitals a debate is raging over the future of the doctor's necktie. One company has turned the debate into an opportunity with a tie whose stain-resistant coating actually thwarts microbes.
Safety Ties come in various patterns, including this brick red/maroon style with silver/gray stripes.
(Credit: SafetySmart)Much evidence has emerged in recent years that doctors wearing ties might actually cause as much harm to patients as doctors who don't wash their hands. In one 2004 study of 42 doctors and medical staffers at the New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens, almost 50 percent of the neckties were host to bacteria that can cause pneumonia, blood infections, and more.
I'm no squirmy person, but that's just gross.
In 2006, the British Medical Association suggested that medical personnel no longer wear "functionless" items such as neckties that carry "superbugs."
And this summer, the American Medical Association considered Resolution 720, which pushed for a dress code that addresses the issue of neckties, long sleeves, and other clothing items and accessories "implicated in the spread of infections in hospitals." Implicated! This has gotten serious, folks. (A committee wants more evidence before bringing the resolution to a vote.)
But because many doctors are publicly pushing for the preservation of the necktie, which is the cred equivalent of gold grills for rappers like Flava Flav, April Strider of SafeSmart in Florida has put her money on a compromise: the high-tech, antimicrobial tie.
Strider tells the Wall Street Journal that the coating "repels bacterial contamination." She even designed the ties with a graphic print of the H1N1 influenza strand, among other "doctor themes," a lovely twist of irony as she manages to put germs on her germ-free ties. Strider's already got a major client in Wilson Memorial Hospital, near Dayton, Ohio, where some docs are wearing polo shirts but others prefer to stick with ties.
A big "oh well" to all the (probably younger) doctors hoping to do away with the necktie altogether. Hey, you could always try Portland, land of the laid-back workplace. Of course, then you'd have to grow a beard, which is a bit like farming your own colony of happy bacteria. At least that H1N1 tie is currently on sale, marked down from $44.95 to $29.95.
A "patient" choosing the Australia theme, one of 10 currently available in the Ambient Experience suite of the National Heart Centre Singapore's cardiac catheterization laboratory.
(Credit: Philips)Cardiac patients undergoing procedures at the National Heart Centre Singapore (NHCS) starting Thursday may find themselves either immersed in a Disney World setting or the African Savannah, with accompanying audio playing in the background. It's part of a testbed project by the center involving Philips' Ambient Experience to soothe patients through the intimidating clinical process of preparation, examination, treatment, and post-procedure.
The Ambient Experience takes patients on a multimedia ride, letting them personalize the lighting, projected images, and sounds in the examination or lab room. The 10 themes can be selected via a menu on a wireless touch-screen tablet, with more themes on the way. Once picked, the patient's choice is projected on the walls and ceilings and through TV screens, wrapping the user in a multi-sensory setting of his or her own choosing.
The wireless touch screen lets the patient instantaneously personalize the room's "theme."
(Credit: Philips)So far, the Ambient Experience appears to have had a positive impact on the three patients who earlier sampled it. According to 75-year-old Neo Bee, who was at the cardiac catheterization laboratory to have angioplasty to open her blocked arteries, "I saw birds and kangaroos on the ceiling and there was soothing music, too. I felt calm and relaxed."
... Read more
(Credit:
GoodGuide)
Just in time for the crazed holiday shopping season, San Francisco-based GoodGuide releases the first iPhone app that lets you scan bar codes for what the guide calls "impartial" health, environmental, and social responsibility ratings of not only the products you are scanning but their companies, too.
GoodGuide's free app lets you scan an item's bar code and instantly retrieve info on that product's health, environmental, and social responsibility ratings.
(Credit: GoodGuide)As our Webware staff wrote in August, "GoodGuide is the reason we have awards for tech services and products: it's a small and relatively unknown service that demonstrates real leadership on the Web." And as we report in Health Tech just this week, GoodGuide is an invaluable resource when shopping for toys, as it provides the levels of lead, mercury, chlorine, etc., that might be in the toys.
But GoodGuide's newest app is quite possibly the group's pinnacle achievement thus far. Now, instead of having to be organized enough to do your research online before hitting the stores, or using the app's 2008 iteration, which involves entering a product into a GoodGuide database on your phone, now anyone with an iPhone can literally scan bar codes while shopping.
Seriously, this could become a tick. I kind of want to spend all day scanning bar codes with the same fervor I used to pop package bubbles as a kid. As GoodGuide spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara (mother of two boys, ages 8 and 5) tells me in a delightful English accent that somehow makes everything sound healthy and socially responsible: "It's making it easier to be good. We all want to do this, but god, who's got the time to research it all?"
I envision scoffing with delight at the higher-priced products that don't actually measure up to their less expensive counterparts, a discovery likely as satisfying as catching a poker player mid-bluff. Or, conversely, I can see justifying a slightly more expensive product that is far healthier for my body and environment.
Of course, the value of such a system hinges on how good the information is. GoodGuide licensed Occipital's RedLaser bar code-scanning technology for this app and culled ratings for more than 62,000 food, personal care, household chemical and toy products and companies, and plans to add thousands more every month. Learn more about GoodGuide's rating system here.
Best of all, of course, is that GoodGuide's app is free--a fact that also sounds delightful in an English accent. All you need is the funds to own an iPhone, but that's a different story.
