Technology and Society – Illuminated Education

Addictive internet games

The Washington Post online had an interesting piece today about teens addicted to onliine games and the havoc such an addiction or obsession can cause in a person’s life. There is, of course, a lot of research and concern about this issue. The author, Caitlin Gibson, quotes psychologist Kimberly Young, founder of the Center for Internet Addiction. As saying the number of kids affected by such an addiction might (modestly) be estimated at “… 5 percent. But 5 percent of American kids is a lot.” The article points to some resources, such as sthe Center for Internet Addiction and a residential facility called reSTART. reSTART, the article states is “…the nation’s first therapeutic retreat devoted specifically to Internet addiction.” Last month reSTART :…launched a new adolescent program…after receiving a barrage of calls from parents desperate to separate their children from video games, consoles, computers and smartphones..” Here in Pasadena, CA…

Cooking Slowly – A Tale of Ever-Changing Times

NOTE: If you find this interesting, click on the link at the end to find an expanded version for which you may be able to obtain Continuing Education credit. There is an old adage that if you put a live frog in a pot of water and heated it gradually, that frog would just sit in the water and not jump away (even though it could) until the water boils and it is thoroughly cooked. It may or may not be true (no one has really tried it since the late 1880s), but either way it is an excellent metaphor for certain things. Some authors have been concerned about the replacement of people with robots, automatic tellers, and other types of automation in the workplace because of the associated loss of jobs (1). This is one concern, but I want to focus on another. It is about humanity and interpersonal…

My Brain Made Me Do It? And Other Questions About Neuroscience

REVIEW: Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld, NY: Basic Books, 2013. This book is short (156 pages of text) and easy to read while being well researched and documented (61 pages of interesting, helpful notes and citations – in a point size enough smaller than the text to make one believe that in the original draft there was as much space, time and effort devoted to this endeavor as there was to the writing of the text) The authors make it clear that they are nether opposed to or over-archingly critical of brain science in general or neuroimaging in specific. They do, however, take the positions that (1) Neuroscience is a brilliant development, but still young and at the very early stages of discovering what it has to discover. (2) Some authors, enthusiasts and members of the media take small discoveries…

Your New Robotic Doc

This holiday weekend I took some time to catch up on my reading and ended up in a place I often end up in. That is the question of how to best configure and offer health care, including care in the area currently termed “mental health.” I put it that way because, as a proponent of integrating mind and body and healing the centuries old Western split between mind and body, I think there really should be no distinction between mental and physical health. Perhaps that is the first point to be made. One short article from the Atlantic Monthly entitled The Robot Will See You Now by Jonathan Cohn generated pages of notes. This article focuses on IBMs Watson, best known for its success on the TV quiz program “Jeopardy,” which apparently is now focused on the medical information available at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. …