" /> Coruscation: June 2014 Archives

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June 29, 2014

Adam Hogan beginning r

Adam Hogan's Beginning r. More r.

June 28, 2014

TradingVolatility.net for $VIX

TradingVolatility.net, great for $VIX, $VXX and volatility tracking.

June 26, 2014

Manifesto - everything I need should be at arms reach: Casey Neistat

"It's an efficiency thing. If you have to stop to spend a few hours looking for a red sharpie, that's a few hours you should've been editing and not looking for a red sharpie. So it's better to have a box that's simply labeled 'red sharpies'. I'm not OCD. I'm just doing it right and everyone else is doing it wrong.

Manifesto for the studio - everything I need to make for a movie should be at arms reach.

-- Casey Neistat

June 25, 2014

CrossValidated

http://stats.stackexchange.com is apparenlty home to Cross Validated, statistics help and seeking help fora at stackexchange.com .

June 19, 2014

French child psychiatrists

Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the United States. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological--psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.

French child psychiatrists, on the other hand, view ADHD as a medical condition that has psycho-social and situational causes. Instead of treating children's focusing and behavioral problems with drugs, French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing the child distress--not in the child's brain but in the child's social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the child's brain.

French child psychiatrists don't use the same system of classification of childhood emotional problems as American psychiatrists. They do not use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM. According to Sociologist Manuel Vallee, the French Federation of Psychiatry developed an alternative classification system as a resistance to the influence of the DSM-3. This alternative was the CFTMEA (Classification Française des Troubles Mentaux de L'Enfant et de L'Adolescent), first released in 1983, and updated in 1988 and 2000. The focus of CFTMEA is on identifying and addressing the underlying psychosocial causes of children's symptoms, not on finding the best pharmacological bandaids with which to mask symptoms.

To the extent that French clinicians are successful at finding and repairing what has gone awry in the child's social context, fewer children qualify for the ADHD diagnosis. Moreover, the definition of ADHD is not as broad as in the American system, which, in my view, tends to "pathologize" much of what is normal childhood behavior. The DSM specifically does not consider underlying causes. It thus leads clinicians to give the ADHD diagnosis to a much larger number of symptomatic children, while also encouraging them to treat those children with pharmaceuticals.

June 17, 2014

Tony Schwartz on More reflection less action

The two of them had been on the road together for four consecutive weeks. I asked how that felt. "It's brutal," he said. "But it's typical. My boss essentially has no openings on his schedule for the next three months."

Think about that for a moment:

This executive had no times at work when he could just breathe deep and relax for a half hour, nor could he step back after a key meeting and quietly metabolize what had just happened or look forward and muse about strategy. He could not simply wander through his office, talking to people about what they're doing, in order to energize and enrich them, and himself.

t's not possible to move from one activity to the next at blinding speed and be reflective at the same time. The more complex and demanding the work we do, the wider, deeper and longer the perspective we require to do it well. It's almost impossible to do that when we create no white space in our lives.

By wider, I mean taking into account the practical effect an action is likely to have on the full range of people affected by it. By deeper, I mean considering the emotional impact the action is likely to have. And by longer, I mean thinking not just about its immediate consequences, but also its implications over time.

Consider this observation from President Obama, caught on an open mike during a stroll with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain in 2008:

"The most important thing you need to do [in this job] is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking."