After barely a  month, I’ve decided to retire the “Stegosaurus of the Week” award. I’ve begun feeling uncomfortable about it, and decided it wasn’t the right thing to be doing.

Since I only average about a post per day on weekdays, and often don’t blog at all on weekends, devoting up to 20% of my posts to a recurrent, insulting joke probably sets the wrong tone for the blog. For one thing, I just got done chastizing the most recent StegoWeek winner for her lack of collegiality (among many more serious faults); I don’t think pointing out bad thinking by others falls to the same level as using your supposed credentials to justify picking a personal fight with a critic that spills over two Web sites, but it’s not the height of professionalism either. And singling people out for their personal lack of perspecuity, instead of focusing only on the deficiencies of their actual writings, is harsh. (Not, perhaps, unnecessarily so - there are a remarkable number of idiots who just have no clue about themselves, and I think it’s helpful to tell them the truth - but I’ll leave it to others.) After one early award resulted in an avalanche of abuse that caused the (richly deserving) recipient to shut down his blog, it started to seem as if this was detracting from debate, not fostering it. There may be more high-minded (though less satisfying) ways of conducting this discourse, and I think I should probably pursue them.

So I won’t be making new awards. That’s not to say that I won’t be turning my critical eye where it is needed - and boy, is it needed! And, too, that’s not to say that the winners to date have not entirely deserved their awards. A final hats-off to the few, and from now on the only, Stegosaurus of the Week Awardees:

1. (6/20/2006) Vital Signs Blog, for asserting his personal, and grossly ignorant, opinion as disproof of a Mayo Clinic report debunking the supposed abortion/breast-cancer link.
2. (6/30/2006) Dawn Eden, for using her amazing mind-reading powers to interpret pro-choice arguments according to her fantasies of what the speakers were feeling, and not what they actually said. (This is really something of a Lifetime Achievement award for Eden, who otherwise would have qualified almost every week.)
3. (7/6/2006) “Pete”, for responding with an unquestioning rant to a satirical “pro-abortion” article in The Onion, and then generating a total of 5 inconsistent posts and a magazine interview defending himself without ever really understanding his own problem.
4. (7/13/2006) “Ladies Against Feminism”, for posting snotty neo-Victorian crap, notably including an anti-birth-control article that somehow managed to work in leeches and euthanasia.
5. (7/24/2006) “Jacquefromtexas”, for claiming credentials as a professional social worker and counselor while adopting an explicitly manipulative, political-activist stance toward her own clients, and spreading the most malignant falsehoods, under cover of her professional stature . . . and much more.

[No] Thanks to all, for making health-ethics blogging what it is!

Brace yourselves:

 If you’re anything like the American public, some of you can’t handle this. AP notes some of the reactions to this cover shot on a magazine devoted to caring for new babies:

“I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine,” one person wrote. “I immediately turned the magazine face down,” wrote another. “Gross,” said a third. . . .

Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies. Yet in a poll of more than 4,000 readers, a quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo — a baby and part of a woman’s breast, in profile — inappropriate.

One mother who didn’t like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it.

“I shredded it,” said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. “A breast is a breast — it’s a sexual thing. He didn’t need to see that.” . . .

“I’m totally supportive of [breastfeeding] — I just don’t like the flashing,” she says. “I don’t want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn’t want to see.”

Look, you nutcase - unless your husband or son are crazier than you are, there isn’t a breast they don’t want to see. (Gay husbands or sons perhaps excepted - and I admit I harbor a hope that Ash’s family includes at least one of the above, just for the sake of imagining her reaction.)

Voices of reason don’t help:

Babytalk editor Susan Kane says the mixed response to the cover clearly echoes the larger debate over breast-feeding in public. “There’s a huge Puritanical streak in Americans,” she says, “and there’s a squeamishness about seeing a body part — even part of a body part.”

“It’s not like women are whipping them out with tassels on them!” she adds. “Mostly, they are trying to be discreet.”

Kane says that since the August issue came out last week, the magazine has received more than 700 letters — more than for any article in years.

“Gross, I am sick of seeing a baby attached to a boob,” wrote Lauren, a mother of a 4-month-old.

The evidence of public discomfort isn’t just anecdotal. In a survey published in 2004 by the American Dietetic Association, less than half — 43 percent — of 3,719 respondents said women should have the right to breast-feed in public places.

Oh, god. It’s not like we haven’t seen this before.

Personally, I favor the tassels.

Hat tip: Zuzu at Feministe, via Tbogg.

I have no freaking idea what this means:

Researchers identified 72 female students who said they favored voluntary euthanasia. Researchers then gave orange juice to these subjects, but half of them got juice spiked with caffeine. The students then read a series of arguments against voluntary euthanasia. An after study showed that the subjects receiving the caffeinated juice remembered more of the arguments AND were more likely to shift towards anti-voluntary euthanasia views. Similar results obtained in a study of 76 males.

[”Coffee for Persuasion, “The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 7, 2006, A17; thanks Timothy Murphy UIC]

More seriously, I guess it’s not surprising that short-term memory retention would be affected by neuroactive drugs - though it’s a bit worrisome that such an ubiquitous one would have such a notable effect. Taking a total wild-ass guess, I would assume that the change in position is a function of the greater retention of the material - that is, that ingesting caffeine doesn’t inherently make you anti-euthanasia, but rather that a differential retention of arguments specifically against that position, caused by the drug, would then tend to skew respondents’ answers in that direction simply because they then had more such arguments in their heads.

Looking further, the original report is here. The situation is more complicated than explained in the blurb above: The students were selected for having opinions favorable to voluntary euthanasia (so the researchers could test the affect of the reading on changing their opinions). They were not just told to read the articles about euthanasia, but were divided into groups and given one of two tasks: either a mechanical editing chore or a specific instruction to read the articles carefully and consciously try to remember the arguments they used; they were then tested on retention and the affect of the articles on influencing their opinions. They were then given counter-messages (articles in favor of voluntary euthanasia) and re-tested on the degree to which receiving the counter-messages undid the change in opinion they had undergone from reading the original arguments.

The results indicated that reading the first (anti-euthanasia) arguments had no effect on opinion or retention, with or without caffeine, for the students who were given the simple editing task without being told to concentrate carefully. However, reading the first argument with careful concentration did improve both retention of the arguments and a change in the students’ opinions; the effect was present in both the caffeinated and the no-caff groups, but it was greater with caffeine. Then, after reading the counter-arguments, students who did not take caffeine reverted their opinions back to their original opinions, but students who did take caffeine were not affected by the counter-messages and retained the new opinions they had adopted after reading the first arguments. (A summary of the report appears below.)

The researchers attribute this to the differential affect of initial arguments and counter-messages: apparently, there is a theory in psychology that when people are exposed to new information, they tend to favor the first message they hear, which sets up a defense in their minds against a counter-message that they hear afterwards. Interestingly, in the above experiment this effect was not observed for the non-caffeine group, but the caffeinated group did show a defensive effect against the counter-message. This seems to me just as important a result from this experiment as the basic effect of the caffeine itself.

The results seem to suggest that caffeine not only aids retention of information (that one is consciously processing already), but somehow fixes it more firmly in the mind or increases one’s susceptibility to being swayed by it. The first part doesn’t seem so startling, but the latter is, to my inexpert perspective at least. It would be interesting to repeat the experiment with, say, bioethicists or others well-versed in the issue, to say whether their opinions would be more vulnerable under caffeine than those of students presumably reading about the issue seriously for the first time. I would predict the professors would not change their existing opinions even with the caffeine boost; if they did, that would suggest that the caffeine not only increases receptivity to new messages but somehow overrides existing strongly held opinions (a result that, frankly, I hope is not the case).

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