Showing posts with label sleeping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sleeping. Show all posts
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Study: A Way to Get Over Fear, While Sleeping
Problem: The general condition of fear, I guess, is the problem. Or, rather, irrational fear, since it is logical and handy to be afraid of things that are actually dangerous. A proven method of getting rid of irrational fears like, say, clowns, or spiders, is exposure therapy. The more you face your fear, the less it will scare you. But exposure therapy is unpleasant, for obvious reasons, and a new study published in Nature Neuroscience looks at whether it can be done successfully while the subject is asleep.
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Methodology: The researchers had to first create fear before they could get rid of it. They used some classic conditioning moves, pairing small electric shocks with images of faces and distinct smells, causing subjects to sweat and grow anxious when they saw certain pictures or smelled certain smells, in anticipation of the shock.
Then they gently wafted the offending smells into subjects’ nostrils while they were napping, specifically waiting for them to enter slow-wave sleep, the stage of sleep during which the brain replays recent memories. Researchers then tested subjects’ reactions both while they were sleeping and after they woke up.
Results: Subjects initially started sweating in their sleep when they smelled the odor related to the shock, but as they continued to smell it over time, their responses lessened. The reduced response carried over to their waking lives as well. An MRI showed that subjects’ brains were reacting less strongly to the faces and odors than they had prior to the sleep exposure.
Implications: A control group, which received exposure therapy while awake and watching a documentary, did not show reduced fear the way the nappers did, which suggests that there’s something about sleep, specifically, that lets researchers target and ameliorate fearful memories. But this finding is limited, of course, to very recent memories. It’s unclear if something similar would work for long-held fears linked to memories from farther in the past.
The study, Stimulus-specific enhancement of fear extinction during slow-wave sleep, appeared in Nature Neuroscience.
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Study: A Way to Get Over Fear, While Sleeping
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Rivals to Hillary Corleone Already Sleeping With the Fishes
Barack Obama’s favourite movie is The Godfather. He once said of his aide Robert Gibbs that “I’ve seen a little bit of Sonny in him once in a while”, referring to the most violent and unstable of Don Corleone’s sons. His former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, once sent a dead fish to a pollster who had disappointed him.
But Obama himself, with his cooler-than-thou mien and disdain for the transactional nature of governing, is an unlikely Family head. He is from Al Capone’s Chicago but somehow not of it. For that aspect of politics, no one does it better than the Clintons.
Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s right-hand man, is said to keep a list on his BlackBerry of people who are “dead to us” because they dared to cross the Clintons in the 2008 campaign. Back then, Bill Richardson, a second-rate former cabinet secretary, endorsed Obama after initially promising fealty to the Clintons, to whom he owed his career, during a Super Bowl game.
Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager, James Carville, immediately denounced Richardson as a Judas Iscariot who had betrayed the Clintons in return for Obama’s 30 pieces of silver. Richardson’s career was essentially over. Carville, like the Clintons, has never taken prisoners. One of his campaign adages is: “When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil.” And Emanuel was with the Clintons long before Obama appeared on the scene.
All this is worth remembering now that Hillary Clinton is preparing for a 2016 presidential bid. Sure, she could opt to spend more time with her family or baking cookies, but no one close to the Clinton political family believes she won’t run. It would be like Don Corleone retiring to an allotment.
While Hillary is temporarily absent from the fray, Clinton loyalists have set up a Ready for Hillary super-Pac (political action committee) on her behalf — legally, she cannot associate with them. It’s a clever move. The group has been busy signing up top Democratic donors and enlisting the best operatives.
As well as Carville, backers include former Clinton capos Thomas “Mack” McLarty, Harold Ickes and Ann Lewis. It’s also been an opportunity for some to make amends. A prominent supporter has been Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, an Obamaite in 2008 who was on the “dead to us” list after saying Bill Clinton was “a great leader but I don’t want my daughter near him”. On Friday she was at a “Madam President” event in Iowa saying she was dreaming of Hillary’s “moment”.
The first casualty of the Ready for Hillary effort appears to have been Vice-President Joe Biden. Old Joe (his teeth and hair are considerably younger but he turned 70 last year) had reckoned, as the incumbent vice-president, that he had a strong claim to be the next Democratic nominee. That was before his 2008 pollster Celinda Lake signed up with Ready for Hillary and the top two grassroots organisers for the Obama-Biden 2012 campaign went to work for the outfit.
Now, Biden is intimating he won’t run if Hillary does. Other potential Democratic rivals are also withering on the vine. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, another former Clinton cabinet secretary, is likely to sit out 2016. So, too, is Newark mayor Cory Booker, sometimes described as America’s second black president. It looks as if the field is clear for Hillary.
Usually it is the Republicans who plump for the previous runner-up — Bob Dole in 1996, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney last year. This time, they look set for a bloody, chaotic campaign. New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky are already tearing lumps out of each other while Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, former Romney running mate Paul Ryan and George W. Bush’s younger brother Jeb are biding their time for now.
Ironically, Obama’s 2008 win has persuaded other newly elected Republican senators that they too could be commander-in-chief. It may well be, however, that after choosing an untested Obama in 2008, America will be looking for a known quantity next time. Hillary’s campaign will be framed as a historic one to elect the first female president. Just as Republicans have found it hard to attack Obama without appearing racist, running against Hillary means the cry of sexism is never far away.
For more than a decade, she has been shedding her old image as a radical Lady Macbeth and crafting a centrist reputation. McCain recently described her as a “rock star” who did a “fine job” at the state department. An easy primary campaign would mean she could resist moving to the left while watching Republicans having to pander to their conservative base.
Obama emerged stronger from his epic 2008 primary battle with Hillary, but that was the exception and, unlike the Republicans now, the ideological differences between the two were minimal.
At 65, Hillary could be almost a generation older than a Republican opponent. Attacking a woman on age grounds, however, could appear distinctly unchivalrous and while the hefty, trash- talking Christie is often portrayed as a Sopranos character, few Mob aficionados would bet on a Soprano against a Corleone.
The Clintons are making it plain they will not tolerate anyone messing this up for them. Anthony Weiner, the weasel-faced New York mayoral candidate, is already in trouble for disrespecting his wife Huma Abedin, Hillary’s senior aide and a beloved sister in the Clinton world.
After the latest revelations of his sexts to a young woman, it was made known the Clintons were displeased. Aides leaked that Philippe Reines, Hillary’s consigliere, had launched an expletive- laced tirade against Weiner during a conference call, threatening to “pull out” his throat. When Abedin visited Doug Band at his apartment, Weiner was ordered to wait outside while his wife took their son in.
The comic drama of the Weiner campaign, not to mention the inevitable dragging up of Bill’s Monica Lewinsky escapade in the 1990s, has given Republicans hope that the new, shiny Clinton brand can be tarnished again. If Weiner should win the New York mayoral primary next month, expect to hear of his body floating in the Hudson shortly afterwards.
Rivals to Hillary Corleone Already Sleeping With the Fishes
Friday, June 21, 2013
Waking a sleeping watchdog
- The group is meant to protect civil liberties against government cybersecurity overreach
- PCLOB was founded in 2004 but critics complain it never really existed
- The president has his first meeting with the group Friday over the NSA leaks
(CNN) — A watchdog group meant to guard Americans’ right to privacy against overreach by government cyber intelligence has been around for years.
If that makes you feel safer, consider this:
It had no leader until May, and lawmakers delayed for years to fully staff it.
President Barack Obama meets with the group for the first time Friday over the two-week old phone and e-mail record-gathering scandal involving the National Security Agency.
The president wants to enlist the group to “structure a national conversation” on government cyber intelligence and civil rights.
Who are the watchdogs?
The group is called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), and though it was created in 2004, it does not appear to have been very active.
It initially answered directly to then-President George W. Bush in an advisory role, but later became an independent agency in 2007 following advice from the 9/11 Commission, according to the White House.
Why little will happen to change how we snoop
Five years later, the PCLOB really only existed on paper, a group of conservative libertarians complained.
In a May 2012 letter to Senators from the group — led by former Republican Representative Bob Barr of Georgia — blasted Washington for dallying on staffing the board, while lawmakers were already considering cybersecurity legislation.
“We are deeply troubled by the fact that it has been almost five years since Congress enacted legislation to create an independent PCLOB with meaningful oversight authority, and yet the Board has not yet come into existence,” the letter read.
Washington lawmakers had bounced nominations to the PCLOB that Obama made in December 2010 back at him, only to have him nominate them again, according to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Their mission? “Minimizing any impact on privacy and civil liberties” while the government expands its fight against cyber threats, the White House posted on its blog a year after floating the nominees.
It encouraged their swift confirmation.
The conservative advocates adamantly backed the liberal president. “We implore you to act without further delay to move these nominations forward,” they wrote to senators.
Last month, Obama appointed financial and economic attorney David Medine to chair the board.
Obama wants to expand its duties to include “big data” — how private companies like Google or Facebook treat information they collect from their customers, he said in an interview with journalist Charlie Rose this week.
Nine years after its inception, PCLOB may begin with its task, now that the NSA’s intelligence activities have been exposed.
The NSA controversy
Earlier this month, Edward Snowden, a former employee of a government contractor, leaked to the media that the NSA had secretly collected and stored millions of phone records from accounts in the United States. It also collected information from U.S. companies on the Internet activity of overseas residents, he said.
The NSA and many Washington politicians, including the president, have justified the surveillance program, called PRISM, as necessary to preventing terrorist threats.
They emphasize that agents are not randomly listening in on phone conversations and only monitoring the internet activity of “non-U.S. persons.”
They mine the data to see who may have contact with known or suspected terrorists, the NSA said. And their work is subject to scrutiny of a court.
Critics complain that the court operates in secrecy, which prevents it from offering a real check to the NSA’s activities. They say that the exposed top-secret program amounts to a gross encroachment by the government upon citizens’ rights to privacy.
PRISM has helped thwart more than 50 terrorist acts worldwide, NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander has said.
But CNN terror analyst Peter Bergen doesn’t think such broad surveillance has helped foil significant plots on U.S. soil. Normal police work has done the job in the overwhelming majority of cases.
PRISM’s supporters and critics are divided between both parties, creating unlikely alliances between Democrats and Republicans to defend or condemn PRISM.
Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor promised “serious investigations into potential wrongdoing” over the program, while his party colleague, Rep. Peter King of New York, said journalists involved in reporting stories about the surveillance programs should be investigated for violating national security.
Snowden has fled to Hong Kong. Lawmakers in Washington are building a criminal case against him.
Waking a sleeping watchdog
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