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Psychiatric adj.精神病学的; 精神病治疗的 diagnosis

That way, madness lies

A new manual for diagnosing diseases of the psyche n.灵魂; 心理; 精神; 心理学 is about to be unveiled


Feb 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition


ON FEBRUARY 10th the world of psychiatry will be asked, metaphorically adv.比喻地, 隐喻地, to lie on the couch and answer questions about the state it thinks it is in. For that is the day the American Psychiatric Association (APA) plans to release a draft of the fifth version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). Mental illness carrying the stigma n.耻辱, 污名that it does, and the brain being as little-understood as it is, revising the DSM is always a controversial undertaking. This time, however, some of the questions asked of the process are likely to be particularly probing(问题)深入尖锐的.


The DSM, the first version of which was published in 1952, lists recognised psychological disorders and the symptoms used to diagnose判断,诊断 them. In the United States, what is in it influences whether someone will be diagnosed with an illness at all, how he will be treated if he is so diagnosed, and whether his insurance company will pay for that treatment. Researchers in other countries generally defer to the DSM, too, making the manual’s definitions a lingua franca混合语 for the science of medical psychology. And, perhaps most profoundly, adv. 深深地; 衷心地the DSM influences how mental illness is understood by society at large.


A new DSM, then, is an important document. The APA has been working on the latest revision since 1999, and will not release the final version until May 2013. But some people are already accusing it of excessive过度的,过分的 secrecy保密,秘密 and being too ambitious about the changes it proposes. Those critics will be picking over the draft next week to see if their fears have been realised.


Manual dexterity

The original DSM reflected the “psychodynamic” adj. 心理动力的，精神动力的view of mental illness, in which problems were thought to result from an interplay n.互相作用between personality and life history. (Think Freud, Jung and long hours recounting v.  详述, 重新计算, 叙述your childhood and dreams.) The third version, which was published in 1980, took a more medical approach. Mental illnesses were seen as distinct and classifiable, like physical diseases. DSM-III came with checklists of symptoms that allowed straightforward, unambiguous diagnosis. Psychiatry began to seem less like an art form and more like a science.


DSM-III also introduced many more diagnoses than had appeared before. These included attention-deficit disorder (see article), post-traumatic [医] 外伤后的stress disorder and social phobia恐惧,厌恶. In fact, the number of specific diagnoses more than doubled between DSM-I and DSM-III, from 106 to 265. DSM-IV, published in 1994, increased the number to 297, but left the underlying model alone.


The APA’s DSM-V task force, however, has suggested it would like to introduce a “new paradigm” n.范例,模范into the manual. It wants to recognise that many conditions, such as anxiety and depression, tend to overlap, n.  重叠, 重复so that a diagnosis of only one or the other does not always make sense. The new version of the DSM is also expected to include a “dimensional” adj.  空间的 component, one that considers the severity as well as the nature of symptoms. This could lead to the paradoxical situation of a symptom (minor depression, for example) being classified as being below the threshold n.  门槛, 开端, 入口for the diagnosis of a disease, but nevertheless still being regarded as a problem—leaving the individual so diagnosed in a weird medical limbo. n.中间状态或位置


The chairmen of two previous DSM task forces have been particularly critical of the present effort. In a letter to Psychiatric Times, written last June, for example, Allen Frances, a psychiatrist at Duke University who chaired the DSM-IV task force, accused his successors of being too secretive, and of closing themselves off from outside opinion. He also worried that adding dimensional ratings to the DSM could lead to many more diagnoses based on symptoms that would previously have placed an individual in the normal range. Pharmaceutical adj.制药学的 companies, eager to expand their markets, would be tempted to pounce on猛扑向 these new “patients”. Dr Frances was supported by Robert Spitzer, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who was chairman of the DSM-III task force.


Members of the present task force, led by Alan Schatzberg, president of the APA, fired back a letter pointing out that they have held conferences, presented papers and consulted more than 200 outside advisers. They also accused Dr Frances and Dr Spitzer of having a financial interest in books based on the DSM-IV criteria. The two admit to receiving royalties, but say it has nothing to do with their criticism.


In the meantime, particular groups who may or may not be classified as “diseased” are also concerned about what ends up in the manual. Some of those with Asperger’s syndrome—who find it hard to “read” the emotional states and intentions of others, but have otherwise typical intellectual faculties—are worried by hints that their condition might be included under the more general heading of “autism spectrum disorder自闭症谱系障碍”. That would lump them with people whose intelligence is profoundly impaired. v.损害, 削弱,Transsexuals, n.变性者 meanwhile, want the diagnoses of “gender identity disorder” and “transvestic fetishism” 易装癖 that the new DSM is expected to promulgate v.  发布, 传播, 公布 changed to be more respectful and less judgmental. In fact, any changes to the list of sexual disorders, including a possible new category called “hypersexual adj.非常好色的; 纵欲的; disorder”, are bound to get attention.


February 10th will be the first chance most people, including the critics, have to look at the document. When they do, the criticism is likely to get louder. After all, the effort to classify and categorise disorders of something as complex as the human mind—especially when that categorisation is done by committee—is unlikely to please everybody. It will be interesting to see what direction the new DSM is going in, and whether it stands up to analysis.

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Tech.view
Patent nonsense

An end to frivolous adj.轻佻的, 琐碎的, 妄动的 patents may finally be in sight在忘

Feb 5th 2010 | From The Economist online

DO PATENTS help or hinder v.妨碍; 阻碍innovation? Instinctively, they would seem a blessing, especially for backroom tinkerers. n.修补匠, Patenting an idea gives its inventor a 20-year monopoly to exploit the fruit of his labour in the marketplace, in exchange for publishing a full account of how the new product, process or material works for all and sundry adj.各式各样的to see. For the inventor, that may be a reasonable trade-off. For society, however, the loss of competition through the granting sole rights to an individual or organisation is justified only if it stimulates the economy and delivers goods that change people’s lives for the better.

Invention, though, is not innovation. It may take a couple of enthusiasts working evenings and weekends for a year or two—not to mention tens of thousands of dollars of their savings—to get a pet idea to the patenting stage. But that is just the beginning. Innovations based on patented inventions or discoveries can take teams of researchers, engineers and marketing experts a decade or more, and tens of millions of dollars, to transfer to the marketplace. And for every bright idea that goes on to become a commercial winner, literally adv.实在地, 不加夸张地; 正确地; 简直thousands fall by the wayside.


Most economists would argue that, without a patent system, even fewer inventions would lead to successful innovations, and those that did would be kept secret for far longer in order to maximise returns. But what if patents actually discourage the combining and recombining of inventions to yield new products and processes—as has happened in biotechnology, genetics and other disciplines?

Or what about those ludicrous business-process patents, like Amazon.com’s “one-click” patent or the “name-your-price” auction patent assigned to Priceline.com? Instead of stimulating innovation, such patents seem more about extracting “rents” from innocent bystanders going about their business. One thing has become clear since business-process patents took off in America during the 1990s: the quality of patents has deteriorated markedly. And with sloppier (sloppy adj. 草率的,不合适的)patenting standards, litigation n.  诉讼, 争讼has increased. The result is higher transaction costs all round.

It is not simply a failure of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to scrutinise vt.仔细检查，核对，推敲，追究applications more rigorously. The Federal Circuit (America’s centralised court of appeal, established in 1982 to hear, among numerous other things, patent disputes) has been responsible for a number of bizarre adj.  奇异的, 异乎寻常的, 极不协调的
rulings. Because of its diverse responsibilities, the Federal Circuit—unlike its counterparts in Europe and Japan—has never really acquired adequate expertise in patent jurisprudence. n.法律学, 法律体系, 法理学

To be eligible adj.符合条件的; 合格的 for a patent, an invention must not just be novel, but also useful and non-obvious. Anything that relies on natural phenomena, abstract ideas or the laws of nature does not qualify. The USPTO has taken to requiring a working prototype n.  原型 of anything that purportedly adv. 据称 breaches v.  破坏, 违反; the laws of physics. So, no more perpetual-motion machines, please.

If truth be told, few inventions are really worth patenting. Time and again, surveys show that in both America and Europe companies rate superior sales and service, lead time and secrecy as far more important than patents when it comes to profiting from innovation. And, although applying for patents is relatively cheap, the cost of maintaining them can be horrendous adj.  可怕的. If the idea behind a patent has any commercial merit, it will attract imitators—and the inventor must be prepared to defend it in the courts. In a majority of cases, the cost of litigation will far exceed any revenue the inventor may subsequently earn from royalties or licensing.



By and large, the inventions and discoveries worth patenting are those in the pharmaceutical adj.  制药学的and biotech fields, where the pay-off for blockbuster n.  巨型炸弹; 一鸣惊人者drugs can amount to billions of dollars a year. Also, because the vast majority of inventions in such areas depend on unique molecular architectures, patents for new products are easier to defend in the courts. A me-too drug that is believed to violate a firm’s patent is either based on the same molecule or not.


Another field where patenting is pursued aggressively is semiconductors. n.半导体 But it is done there not so much to make money, nor even to bar others from using the acquired know-how. Its main purpose is for negotiating cross-licensing deals with competitors. Of necessity, inventions in chipmaking rely on some of existing technology, which is itself covered by hundreds of patents held by numerous other firms. Without a large portfolio of patents to trade beforehand, semiconductor firms developing incrementally n. 增加(增加物，增量，余差) improved products (next-generation microprocessors and memory chips, for instance) would run into litigation and injunctions n.命令; 禁令; 指令at every turn.


Pursuing patents aggressively for cross-licensing agreements has little to do with encouraging innovation, though. Indeed, by increasing transaction costs, such deals are in effect a tax on innovation. By the same token, how much of a contribution have the 12,000 or so business processes patented annually in America (but few places elsewhere) made to innovation? Precious little, by all accounts. It is hard enough to find evidence (outside the pharmaceutical and biotech industries) showing that the patent system generally spurs innovation. It is harder still to find justification for business-process patents.

What is clear is that the “non-obviousness” part of the test for patentability has not been applied anywhere near rigorously adv.  严厉地; 残酷地 enough to internet and business-process patents. Because they lack a history of “prior art” to refer to, examiners and judges have granted a lot of shoddy adj.  劣等的; 假冒的patents for software and business processes.


Mercifully, that is beginning to change. America’s Supreme Court is about to issue a ruling which, by all accounts, will make it difficult, if not impossible, to get a patent for a business process. And because most business processes are, at bottom, computer algorithms, n.运算法则the Supreme Court’s judgment could also bar all sorts of software patents in the process. As a result, a lot of patents for online shopping, medical-diagnostic tests and procedures for executing trades on Wall Street could be invalidated.

The roots of the dispute go back more than a decade to two inventors, Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw, who sought to patent a method of hedging weather-related risks in energy prices. The USPTO concluded that the process was too abstract and denied the application. On appeal, the Federal Circuit actually upheld the patent office’s decision—and said, crucially, that the process would be eligible for a patent only if it was “tied to a particular machine or apparatus” or if it “transformed a particular article into a different state or thing”. Failing on both counts, the inventors took their case to the Supreme Court, which has been pondering adj. 经过深思熟虑的for the past few months whether the “machine-or-transformation” test is an appropriate standard. It is hard to conclude it is not.



An end to frivolous adj.轻佻的, 琐碎的, 妄动的patents for business processes will be a blessing to online commerce. Meanwhile, the loss of patent protection for software could make programmers realise at last that they have more in common with authors, artists, publishers and musicians than they ever had with molecular architects and chip designers. In short, they produce expressions of ideas that are eminently adv.  突出地; 极好地copyrightable.


That could be good news for innovation. After all, who in his right mind would seek a lousy old patent offering a mere 20 years of protection when copyright can provide monopoly rights for up to 70 years after the author’s death? That one fact alone could spur more innovation than all the tinkering attempted so far.

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Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC abbr. 联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会
A time for introspection n.内省; 自省; 反省

Increasing scrutiny of the Intergovernmental Panel专门问题小组 on Climate Change and, in particular, its chairman, should lead to reforms

Feb 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

THE past month has not been a good one for Rajendra Pachauri (pictured above), the charismatic adj.  神赐能力的; 领袖魅力的 chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of TERI, an Indian research institute. His numerous positions on boards and industrial advisory panels, in India and beyond, have led to charges of conflicts of interest. His intemperate adj.不节制的,过度的 defence of mistakes about Himalayan glaciers in the most recent IPCC report had to be followed by a public statement of regret as it became clear that the IPCC had indeed been wrong—and that its source has been a magazine article rather than a piece of scientific literature. And, to cap it all, public mockery n.嘲弄, 蔑视, 笑柄 of mildly salacious adj.  好色的, 黄色的, 猥亵的 passages in his recently published novel (he writes poetry, too) has added further spice, if not substance, to the stories.

The mistaken claim about the glaciers—that they could disappear by 2035—“never really came to my attention” before the end of last year, Dr Pachauri maintains, though the opportunities for it to have done so were numerous. Syed Hasnain, the researcher cited by press reports as a source for the number (though he denies saying it), is now a consultant at TERI, though Dr Pachauri says he “hardly interacts” with him. The claim featured prominently adv.  显著地; 重要地in a presentation that Anastasios Kentarchos of the European Union gave at a TERI meeting where Dr Pachauri was to deliver a “keynote” address. Dr Pachauri, however, says he left without attending any of the actual sessions. Pallava Bagla, who brought the story to wide attention in Science last November, says he discussed the matter with Dr Pachauri and e-mailed him about it. Dr Pachauri says the discussions were just a question at a press conference that he did not really take on board, and that he read no such e-mails.

Shades of grey
The glacier story has led the IPCC’s critics to pore over its most recent report, focusing on claims that arise from the “grey literature”—normally taken to mean reports by governments and other organisations that are not published commercially or passed through academic channels. It is widely believed the IPCC looks only at peer-reviewed同行评审 studies, but the panel’s guidelines do allow information from elsewhere, as long as it is critically assessed and has proper references.

What counts as grey, though, is itself a grey area. Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution, who is co-chairman of the IPCC’s working group II, defends his decision to cite a story from the New York Times as an illustration of the effect of poor electricity supply during a heatwave n.热浪: it was not being used to provide quantitative data, or an assessment of how confident one should be in a result, but just to say that something happened. Still, most would not see the Gray Lady as grey literature.

To accept a role for grey literature at the IPCC, provided it is properly and critically assessed by the authors, is not to say that peer-reviewed publications should not dominate the assessments. They should. But to allow nothing but peer-reviewed literature would not only cut the IPCC off from some relevant material, it could also help well-placed insiders to marginalise vt.使边缘化，排斥opinions they do not approve of. There are indications of this in some of the e-mails from and to the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that were released on to the web late last year.

The IPCC’s own review process is more catholic ; it is quite easy to become a reviewer. But that may not, in itself, be enough. One reviewer of the previous report pointed out work by Roger Pielke junior of the University of Colorado that contradicted what the IPCC was saying about climate-related trends in the costs of disasters. In responding, an anonymous IPCC author said that he or she believed Dr Pielke had changed his mind on the matter, without either asking him or, apparently, studying his most recent publications on the subject, which showed he had not. (Dr Pielke also thinks a graph on the subject was redrawn to buttress v.用扶壁支撑; 扶持a case that cannot actually be stood up.)

The fact that critics can dig far enough into the reviewing process to see such details speaks well of the IPCC’s transparency n.  透明, 透明物, 透明度, but not all of its procedures are easy to scrutinise vt. 仔细检查，核对，推敲，追究. The selection of authors, for example, is something of a black box. Since it is on the expertise, judgment and character of these authors, as much or more than on procedure, that the whole enterprise rests, this needs reform.

Other procedures are simply lacking. Charges of conflict of interest levelled at Dr Pachauri are hard to judge because the governments which organise the IPCC have provided no way for interests to be declared, or for conflicts to be assessed. Dr Pachauri says he would be quite happy for them to do so. At the same time, interpreting such conflict as suggestive of personal gain, he rejects charges made against him. He says that, on his appointment in 2002, he refused even to take money for his office from the IPCC, and that all payments for his advice and services go to TERI, not to him. Though he has brought new resources and standing to the institute, his TERI salary, he says, has risen only in line with inflation. How much that would be, though, he cannot say. He does not, apparently, trouble himself to know what his salary actually is.

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这篇小文还是很简单的...不过每次复制都只有这么一点..所以..我还是传个附件好了~..

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Carbon markets after Copenhagen  n.哥本哈根

Don't hold your breath

Why hasn’t the carbon price fallen further?

Feb 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

SOMETHING curious has been happening in the carbon markets. They are entirely political creations—even the most inventive financial engineers would not, on their own, have come up with the idea of a difference in value between the air people breathe in and the air they breathe out. Yet traders seem pretty uninterested in political cues. At the chaotic end of the Copenhagen climate summit in December, prices in the largest market in carbon-dioxide emissions, the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), did drop from

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Sexing雌雄鉴别 chickens

Hey little hen

A way to determine the sex of a chicken embryo
before it hatches v.  孵化; 出壳; 孵出should save money and improve animal welfare

Feb 9th 2010 | From The Economist online

IN THE world of poultry n.家禽; 家禽肉 farming, the sexes are unequal. Broilers n.炙肉 aside, hens can look forward, if that is the right phrase, to productive and reasonably long lives as layers of eggs for human consumption. Cocks are generally for the chop, a process that vexes v.使烦恼, 恼怒animal-welfare activists. Only those few needed to keep the species going are allowed to live beyond chickdom.

Sorting the quick from the soon-to-be-dead, though, is a tedious adj.  冗长乏味的; 使人厌烦的process. “Vent sexing”, the most common way, requires a worker to squeezea chick’s anal adj.  直肠的, 肛门的 vent n.出口or cloaca n.泄殖腔, to clear the faeces n.排泄物and assess the size of a telltale指示器bump inside the hole. Not the most popular of jobs. The alternative, “feather sexing,” is a form of cross-breeding that leaves females with detectably longer pin feathers than those of their male counterparts. This is slightly more salubrious adj.  有益健康的, 清爽的, but the long-feather gene has been linked to other traits that may be undesirable to hatcheries, such as cancer. That discourages hatchers from adopting the method.

Yet chicken-sexing is a huge industry. The world’s population of laying hens is now nearly six billion strong, according to the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. That is very nearly one hen for every human being. Time, then, to mechanise the process. And that is precisely what Tauseef Butt, a biomedical engineer and the boss of LifeSensors, of Malvern, Pennsylvania, proposes to do.

Dr Butt’s new device is an oestrogen n.  雌激素sniffer n.  嗅探器. It relies on the fact that female embryos produce this hormone n.  荷尔蒙; 激素in quantity and male ones do not. The sensor n.传感器; 感应器 uses a fine needle to penetrate v.  穿透,渗透; 刺入both the shell and the allantoic adj.  尿囊的;尿囊内的sac of an egg. This sac is a fluid-filled membrane n.  薄膜that cushions the embryo and helps it trade carbon dioxide for oxygen from the air. (It is also the membrane that can make peeling a hard-boiled egg such a frustrating affair.)

The fluid sample thus extracted is mixed with genetically engineered yeast n.  酵母, 发酵粉cells that fluoresce vi. 发荧光 in the presence of oestrogen. The light so generated is recorded by a camera linked to a computer that keeps track of where the egg that produced the sample is now stored. Initial experiments, reported recently in the Journal of Animal Science, show that the process does not affect the hatchability of tested eggs, and appears to be virtually foolproof adj.十分简单的; 极坚固的; 十分安全的, if rather long-winded (the results are available only after two hours).


In future, Dr Butt envisages v.  想像, 设想 the egg-sorting operation of a large hatchery might look like this: A conveyor belt moves the eggs along, gently jostling them until their allantoic sacs point upright. They then pass beneath an array of needles, which draw fluid from each. That done, they are sorted into bar-coded条形码trays. Two hours later, once the samples have been analysed and the sex of each egg determined, they are returned to a sorter and divided by sex. The unfortunate male embryos then end up as pet food while the females go on to their lives as egg-mothers.


It would require some engineering (and a significant amount of storage space) to incorporate such a system into a hatchery. But the tweaks v.扭; 拧; 捏on the actual production line would be relatively minor, according to Dr Butt, and could be incorporated into the existing systems of robotic injectors used to pump vaccines into unhatched eggs.

Dr Butt reckons v.  计算, 数the cost of his system would be two or three cents per egg. The savings in labour, and in the cost of feeding and vaccinating cocks that slip through the existing procedures, should outweigh this. Sad for the redundant sexers, of course. But, as the adage n.  谚语; 古语; 格言; 箴言 has it, you can’t make an omelette n.  煎蛋卷 without breaking eggs. 有所失才有所得