I don’t have a good way to tie this to our research, but I’ll stretch …

A BBC program says that drugs for ADHD (like Ritalin) don’t work well for kids over the long-term.  This study is a follow-up of a study by the same authors that found that over the first year the drugs had very positive effects.  Over a three-year time-frame, the authors found (a) NO beneficial effects; but (b) significant decrease in height and weight gain.  I haven’t read the scientific papers, so I don’t know how strong these results were, but I imagine they’re scary for parents.  The problem is that some kids who need these drugs are quite difficult to manage without them, even getting violent.  What can be done for them, their parents, and their teachers?

Now the stretch …

When I worked in Net Perceptions, I noticed that many Internet executives had the classic problems associated with ADHD: short attention span, inability to sit still, and excitability.  I speculated at the time that the Internet boom would bust if Ritalin ever got into the Silicon Valley water supply :).  If we did have a way to dial up the perfect personality for each of us, I wonder what the long-term social effects would be?  Would we have a lot more happy people and a lot less innovation?  How do we as a society make the trade-offs between value to the society and value to the individual? 

John

Powered by ScribeFire.

If you haven’t played with one of these, you should try it.  It’s an awesome multi-user interface.  The applications are pretty fun, too, but the really exciting thing is imagining all the new things one might build if one had one of these in one’s own lab :).

Powered by ScribeFire.

Will Facebook Join OpenSocial? R/WW Readers Split 50/50!

Intriguing question: who will choose to join the OpenSocial opportunity Max blogged about?  Traditional wisdom suggests that only the losers benefit from standardization, and that the winners will try hard to stay away from it.  (And, if they do join it, to embrace and destroy the standard, but that’s another story.) 

It’s easy to explain the advantage to everyone else of having Facebook join the party.  What are the advantages to Facebook?  Social networking sites should be a vortex, with people motivated to join and stay on the sites with the most other users.  Making it easy for people to migrate their information would reduce the stickiness.  If this analysis is correct, the only way for the rest of the world to win would be for the community of “everyone else” to be larger than the community Facebook can attract itself.  It would be interesting to analyze the distributions of membership on social network sites that lead to success for openness versus those that predict that proprietary is the way to win.

John

ScribeFire is a cool tool that makes it easy to create a blog entry in your favorite blog tool.  Just install the plugin, add your favorite blogs, and you’re one click from publishing to the blogs.  A very nice example of how a tool can lower the barrier to entry just enough to let you blog about things that you might otherwise just smile at :).

Even more fun: the current developer is Chris Finke, a very talented former Chipmarker!

John

A friend told me about an interesting use for Mechanical Turk.  He says he uses it to get research tasks accomplished that he’d otherwise have to pay hourly employees to take on.  For instance, coding documents for quality can be created as a Mechanical Turk job, and then the documents can be uploaded, and the users started off.  He says that unless you can get your hourly workers for $1/hour, MT is usually cheaper.

John