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Sunday, February 28, 2010

Depression’s Upside

The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by “excitements,” “flurries” leading to an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that triggered his “head symptoms.” In one particularly pitiful letter, written to a specialist in “psychological medicine,” he confessed to “extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence” and “hysterical crying” whenever Emma, his devoted wife, left him alone.

While there has been endless speculation about Darwin’s mysterious ailment — his symptoms have been attributed to everything from lactose intolerance to Chagas disease — Darwin himself was most troubled by his recurring mental problems. His depression left him “not able to do anything one day out of three,” choking on his “bitter mortification.” He despaired of the weakness of mind that ran in his family. “The ‘race is for the strong,’ ” Darwin wrote. “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in Science.”

Darwin, of course, was wrong; his recurring fits didn’t prevent him from succeeding in science. Instead, the pain may actually have accelerated the pace of his research, allowing him to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work. His letters are filled with references to the salvation of study, which allowed him to temporarily escape his gloomy moods. “Work is the only thing which makes life endurable to me,” Darwin wrote and later remarked that it was his “sole enjoyment in life.”

For Darwin, depression was a clarifying force, focusing the mind on its most essential problems. In his autobiography, he speculated on the purpose of such misery; his evolutionary theory was shadowed by his own life story. “Pain or suffering of any kind,” he wrote, “if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action, yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.” And so sorrow was explained away, because pleasure was not enough. Sometimes, Darwin wrote, it is the sadness that informs as it “leads an animal to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial.” The darkness was a kind of light.

The mystery of depression is not that it exists — the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead, the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence. While most mental illnesses are extremely rare — schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1 percent of the population — depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold. Every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by the awful mental state that William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . . a storm of murk.” Obsessed with our pain, we will retreat from everything. We will stop eating, unless we start eating too much. Sex will lose its appeal; sleep will become a frustrating pursuit. We will always be tired, even though we will do less and less. We will think a lot about death.

The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself.

The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.

ANDY THOMSON IS a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. He has a scruffy gray beard and steep cheekbones. When Thomson talks, he tends to close his eyes, as if he needs to concentrate on what he’s saying. But mostly what he does is listen: For the last 32 years, Thomson has been tending to his private practice in Charlottesville. “I tend to get the real hard cases,” Thomson told me recently. “A lot of the people I see have already tried multiple treatments. They arrive without much hope.” On one of the days I spent with Thomson earlier this winter, he checked his phone constantly for e-mail updates. A patient of his on “welfare watch” who was required to check in with him regularly had not done so, and Thomson was worried. “I’ve never gotten used to treating patients in mental pain,” he said. “Maybe it’s because every story is unique. You see one case of iron-deficiency anemia, you’ve seen them all. But the people who walk into my office are all hurting for a different reason.”

In the late 1990s, Thomson became interested in evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain the features of the human mind in terms of natural selection. The starting premise of the field is that the brain has a vast evolutionary history, and that this history shapes human nature. We are not a blank slate but a byproduct of imperfect adaptations, stuck with a mind that was designed to meet the needs of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. While the specifics of evolutionary psychology remain controversial — it’s never easy proving theories about the distant past — its underlying assumption is largely accepted by mainstream scientists. There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculptured the fleshy machine inside our head. Instead, researchers have moved on to new questions like when and how this sculpturing happened and which of our mental traits are adaptations and which are accidents.

In 2004, Thomson met Paul Andrews, an evolutionary psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, who had long been interested in the depression paradox — why a disorder that’s so costly is also so common. Andrews has long dark brown hair and an aquiline nose. Before he begins to talk, he often writes down an outline of his answer on scratch paper. “This is a very delicate subject,” he says. “I don’t want to say something reckless.”

Andrews and Thomson struck up an extended conversation on the evolutionary roots of depression. They began by focusing on the thought process that defines the disorder, which is known as rumination. (The verb is derived from the Latin word for “chewed over,” which describes the act of digestion in cattle, in which they swallow, regurgitate and then rechew their food.) In recent decades, psychiatry has come to see rumination as a dangerous mental habit, because it leads people to fixate on their flaws and problems, thus extending their negative moods. Consider “The Depressed Person,” a short story by David Foster Wallace, which chronicles a consciousness in the grip of the ruminative cycle. (Wallace struggled with severe depression for years before committing suicide in 2008.) The story is a long lament, a portrait of a mind hating itself, filled with sentences like this: “What terms might be used to describe such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be?” The dark thoughts of “The Depressed Person” soon grow tedious and trying, but that’s precisely Wallace’s point. There is nothing profound about depressive rumination. There is just a recursive loop of woe.

The bleakness of this thought process helps explain why, according to the Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, people with “ruminative tendencies” are more likely to become depressed. They’re also more likely to become unnerved by stressful events: for instance, Nolen-Hoeksema found that residents of San Francisco who self-identified as ruminators showed significantly more depressive symptoms after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. And then there are the cognitive deficits. Because rumination hijacks the stream of consciousness — we become exquisitely attentive to our pain — numerous studies have found that depressed subjects struggle to think about anything else, just like Wallace’s character. The end result is poor performance on tests for memory and executive function, especially when the task involves lots of information. (These deficits disappear when test subjects are first distracted from their depression and thus better able to focus on the exercise.) Such research has reinforced the view that rumination is a useless kind of pessimism, a perfect waste of mental energy.

That, at least, was the scientific consensus when Andrews and Thomson began exploring the depression paradox. Their evolutionary perspective, however — they see the mind as a fine-tuned machine that is not prone to pointless programming bugs — led them to wonder if rumination had a purpose. They started with the observation that rumination was often a response to a specific psychological blow, like the death of a loved one or the loss of a job. (Darwin was plunged into a debilitating grief after his 10-year-old daughter, Annie, died following a bout of scarlet fever.) Although the D.S.M. manual, the diagnostic bible for psychiatrists, does not take such stressors into account when diagnosing depressive disorder — the exception is grief caused by bereavement, as long as the grief doesn’t last longer than two months — it’s clear that the problems of everyday life play a huge role in causing mental illness. “Of course, rumination is unpleasant,” Andrews says. “But it’s usually a response to something real, a real setback. It didn’t seem right that the brain would go haywire just when we need it most.”

Imagine, for instance, a depression triggered by a bitter divorce. The ruminations might take the form of regret (“I should have been a better spouse”), recurring counterfactuals (“What if I hadn’t had my affair?”) and anxiety about the future (“How will the kids deal with it? Can I afford my alimony payments?”). While such thoughts reinforce the depression — that’s why therapists try to stop the ruminative cycle — Andrews and Thomson wondered if they might also help people prepare for bachelorhood or allow people to learn from their mistakes. “I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships,” Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.”

This radical idea — the scientists were suggesting that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit — has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso”: “Hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/To hit the sense of human sight.” The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

But Andrews and Thomson weren’t interested in ancient aphorisms or poetic apologias. Their daunting challenge was to show how rumination might lead to improved outcomes, especially when it comes to solving life’s most difficult dilemmas. Their first speculations focused on the core features of depression, like the inability of depressed subjects to experience pleasure or their lack of interest in food, sex and social interactions. According to Andrews and Thomson, these awful symptoms came with a productive side effect, because they reduced the possibility of becoming distracted from the pressing problem.

The capacity for intense focus, they note, relies in large part on a brain area called the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which is located a few inches behind the forehead. While this area has been associated with a wide variety of mental talents, like conceptual knowledge and verb conjugation, it seems to be especially important for maintaining attention. Experiments show that neurons in the VLPFC must fire continuously to keep us on task so that we don’t become sidetracked by irrelevant information. Furthermore, deficits in the VLPFC have been associated with attention-deficit disorder.

Several studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients. Most recently, a paper to be published next month by neuroscientists in China found a spike in “functional connectivity” between the lateral prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain in depressed patients, with more severe depressions leading to more prefrontal activity. One explanation for this finding is that the hyperactive VLPFC underlies rumination, allowing people to stay focused on their problem. (Andrews and Thomson argue that this relentless fixation also explains the cognitive deficits of depressed subjects, as they are too busy thinking about their real-life problems to bother with an artificial lab exercise; their VLPFC can’t be bothered to care.) Human attention is a scarce resource — the neural effects of depression make sure the resource is efficiently allocated.

But the reliance on the VLPFC doesn’t just lead us to fixate on our depressing situation; it also leads to an extremely analytical style of thinking. That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to “work” with all the information stuck in consciousness. When people rely on working memory — and it doesn’t matter if they’re doing long division or contemplating a relationship gone wrong — they tend to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down their complex problems into their simpler parts.

The bad news is that this deliberate thought process is slow, tiresome and prone to distraction; the prefrontal cortex soon grows exhausted and gives out. Andrews and Thomson see depression as a way of bolstering our feeble analytical skills, making it easier to pay continuous attention to a difficult dilemma. The downcast mood and activation of the VLPFC are part of a “coordinated system” that, Andrews and Thomson say, exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.” If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.

Consider a young professor on tenure track who was treated by Thomson. The patient was having difficulties with his academic department. “This guy was used to success coming easy, but now it wasn’t,” Thomson says. “I made it clear that I thought he’d need some time to figure out his next step. His problem was like a splinter, and the pain wouldn’t go away until the splinter was removed.” Should the patient leave the department? Should he leave academia? Or should he try to resolve the disagreement? Over the next several weeks, Thomson helped the patient analyze his situation and carefully think through the alternatives. “We took it one variable at a time,” Thomson says. “And it eventually became clear to him that the departmental issues couldn’t be fixed. He needed to leave. Once he came to that conclusion, he started feeling better.”

The publication of Andrews and Thomson’s 36,000-word paper in the July 2009 issue of Psychological Review had a polarizing effect on the field. While some researchers, like Jerome Wakefield, a professor at New York University who specializes in the conceptual foundations of clinical theory, greeted the paper as “an extremely important first step toward the re-evaluation of depression,” other psychiatrists regarded it as little more than irresponsible speculation, a justification for human suffering. Peter Kramer, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, describes the paper as “a ladder with a series of weak rungs.” Kramer has long defended the use of antidepressants — his landmark work, “Listening to Prozac,” chronicled the profound improvements of patients taking the drugs — and criticized those who romanticized depression, which he compares to the glamorization of tuberculosis in the late 19th century. In a series of e-mail messages to me, Kramer suggested that Andrews and Thomson n

eglect the variants of depression that don’t fit their evolutionary theory. “This study says nothing about chronic depression and the sort of self-hating, paralyzing, hopeless, circular rumination it inspires,” Kramer wrote. And what about post-stroke depression? Late-life depression? Extreme depressive condition? Kramer argues that there’s a clear category difference between a healthy response to social stressors and the response of people with depressive disorder. “Depression is not really like sadness,” Kramer has written. “It’s more an oppressive flattening of feeling.”

Even scientists who are sympathetic to what Andrews and Thomson call the “analytic-rumination hypothesis” remain critical of its details. Ed Hagen, an anthropologist at Washington State University who is working on a book with Andrews, says that while the analytic-rumination hypothesis has persuaded him that some depressive symptoms might improve problem-solving skills, he remains unconvinced that it is a sufficient explanation for depression. “Individuals with major depression often don’t groom, bathe and sometimes don’t even use the toilet,” Hagen says. They also significantly “reduce investment in child care,” which could have detrimental effects on the survival of offspring. The steep fitness costs of these behaviors, Hagen says, would not be offset by “more uninterrupted time to think.”

Other scientists, including Randolph Nesse at the University of Michigan, say that complex psychiatric disorders like depression rarely have simple evolutionary explanations. In fact, the analytic-rumination hypothesis is merely the latest attempt to explain the prevalence of depression. There is, for example, the “plea for help” theory, which suggests that depression is a way of eliciting assistance from loved ones. There’s also the “signal of defeat” hypothesis, which argues that feelings of despair after a loss in social status help prevent unnecessary attacks; we’re too busy sulking to fight back. And then there’s “depressive realism”: several studies have found that people with depression have a more accurate view of reality and are better at predicting future outcomes. While each of these speculations has scientific support, none are sufficient to explain an illness that afflicts so many people. The moral, Nesse says, is that sadness, like happiness, has many functions.

Although Nesse says he admires the analytic-rumination hypothesis, he adds that it fails to capture the heterogeneity of depressive disorder. Andrews and Thomson compare depression to a fever helping to fight off infection, but Nesse says a more accurate metaphor is chronic pain, which can arise for innumerable reasons. “Sometimes, the pain is going to have an organic source,” he says. “Maybe you’ve slipped a disc or pinched a nerve, in which case you’ve got to solve that underlying problem. But much of the time there is no origin for the pain. The pain itself is the dysfunction.”

Andrews and Thomson respond to such criticisms by acknowledging that depression is a vast continuum, a catch-all term for a spectrum of symptoms. While the analytic-rumination hypothesis might explain those patients reacting to an “acute stressor,” it can’t account for those whose suffering has no discernible cause or whose sadness refuses to lift for years at a time. “To say that depression can be useful doesn’t mean it’s always going to be useful,” Thomson says. “Sometimes, the symptoms can spiral out of control. The problem, though, is that as a society, we’ve come to see depression as something that must always be avoided or medicated away. We’ve been so eager to remove the stigma from depression that we’ve ended up stigmatizing sadness.”

For Thomson, this new theory of depression has directly affected his medical practice. “That’s the litmus test for me,” he says. “Do these ideas help me treat my patients better?” In recent years, Thomson has cut back on antidepressant prescriptions, because, he says, he now believes that the drugs can sometimes interfere with genuine recovery, making it harder for people to resolve their social dilemmas. “I remember one patient who came in and said she needed to reduce her dosage,” he says. “I asked her if the antidepressants were working, and she said something I’ll never forget. ‘Yes, they’re working great,’ she told me. ‘I feel so much better. But I’m still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It’s just now he’s tolerable.’ ”

The point is the woman was depressed for a reason; her pain was about something. While the drugs made her feel better, no real progress was ever made. Thomson’s skepticism about antidepressants is bolstered by recent studies questioning their benefits, at least for patients with moderate depression. Consider a 2005 paper led by Steven Hollon, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University: he found that people on antidepressants had a 76 percent chance of relapse within a year when the drugs were discontinued. In contrast, patients given a form of cognitive talk therapy had a relapse rate of 31 percent. And Hollon’s data aren’t unusual: several studies found that patients treated with medication were approximately twice as likely to relapse as patients treated with cognitive behavior therapy. “The high relapse rate suggests that the drugs aren’t really solving anything,” Thomson says. “In fact, they seem to be interfering with the solution, so that patients are discouraged from dealing with their problems. We end up having to keep people on the drugs forever. It was as if these people have a bodily infection, and modern psychiatry is just treating their fever.”

Thomson describes a college student who was referred to his practice. “It was clear that this patient was in a lot of pain,” Thomson says. “He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t study. He had some family issues” — his parents were recently divorced — “and his father was exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on him to go to graduate school. Because he’s got a family history of depression, the standard of care would be to put him on drugs right away. And a few years ago, that’s what I would have done.”

Instead, Thomson was determined to help the student solve his problem. “What you’re trying to do is speed along the rumination process,” Thomson says. “Once you show people the dilemma they need to solve, they almost always start feeling better.” He cites as evidence a recent study that found “expressive writing” — asking depressed subjects to write essays about their feelings — led to significantly shorter depressive episodes. The reason, Thomson suggests, is that writing is a form of thinking, which enhances our natural problem-solving abilities. “This doesn’t mean there’s some miracle cure,” he says. “In most cases, the recovery period is going to be long and difficult. And that’s what I told this young student. I said: ‘I know you’re hurting. I know these problems seem impossible. But they’re not. And I can help you solve them.’ ”

IT’S TOO SOON to judge the analytic-rumination hypothesis. Nobody knows if depression is an adaptation or if Andrews and Thomson have merely spun another “Just So” story, a clever evolutionary tale that lacks direct evidence. Nevertheless, their speculation is part of a larger scientific re-evaluation of negative moods, which have long been seen as emotional states to avoid. The dismissal of sadness and its synonyms is perhaps best exemplified by the rise of positive psychology, a scientific field devoted to the pursuit of happiness. In recent years, a number of positive psychologists have written popular self-help books, like “The How of Happiness” and “Authentic Happiness,” that try to outline the scientific principles behind “lasting fulfillment” and “getting the life we want.”

The new research on negative moods, however, suggests that sadness comes with its own set of benefits and that even our most unpleasant feelings serve an important purpose. Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy — Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer — are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers.

Last year Forgas ventured beyond the lab and began conducting studies in a small stationery store in suburban Sydney, Australia. The experiment itself was simple: Forgas placed a variety of trinkets, like toy soldiers, plastic animals and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To control for the effect of mood, Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days — he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s “Requiem” — and on sunny days, using a soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.

The enhancement of these mental skills might also explain the striking correlation between creative production and depressive disorders. In a survey led by the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were interviewed about their mental history. Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British writers and artists by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

And then there’s the virtue of self-loathing, which is one of the symptoms of depression. When people are stuck in the ruminative spiral, their achievements become invisible; the mind is only interested in what has gone wrong. While this condition is typically linked to withdrawal and silence — people become unwilling to communicate — there’s some suggestive evidence that states of unhappiness can actually improve our expressive abilities. Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

This line of research led Andrews to conduct his own experiment, as he sought to better understand the link between negative mood and improved analytical abilities. He gave 115 undergraduates an abstract-reasoning test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which requires subjects to identify a missing segment in a larger pattern. (Performance on the task strongly predicts general intelligence.) The first thing Andrews found was that nondepressed students showed an increase in “depressed affect” after taking the test. In other words, the mere presence of a challenging problem — even an abstract puzzle — induced a kind of attentive trance, which led to feelings of sadness. It doesn’t matter if we’re working on a mathematical equation or working through a broken heart: the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal.

But is that closeness effective? Does the despondency help us solve anything? Andrews found a significant correlation between depressed affect and individual performance on the intelligence test, at least once the subjects were distracted from their pain: lower moods were associated with higher scores. “The results were clear,” Andrews says. “Depressed affect made people think better.” The challenge, of course, is persuading people to accept their misery, to embrace the tonic of despair. To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness. A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.

Jonah Lehrer is the author of “How We Decide” and of the blog The Frontal Cortex. 


Via:
www.nytimes.com
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The New York Times' Best Sellers List - February 28th, 2010



Hardcover Fiction

Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett
2. WORST CASE, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge
3. THE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown
4. POOR LITTLE BITCH GIRL, by Jackie Collins
5. WINTER GARDEN, by Kristin Hannah

Hardcover Nonfiction

Top 5 at a Glance
1. GAME CHANGE, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
2. THE POLITICIAN, by Andrew Young
3. THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, by Rebecca Skloot
4. I AM OZZY, by Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres
5. WILLIE MAYS, by James S. Hirsch

Paperback Trade Fiction

Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE LAST SONG, by Nicholas Sparks
2. A RELIABLE WIFE, by Robert Goolrick
3. LITTLE BEE, by Chris Cleave
4. DEAR JOHN, by Nicholas Sparks
5. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson

Paperback Mass-Market Fiction

Top 5 at a Glance
1. DEAR JOHN, by Nicholas Sparks
2. FIRST FAMILY, by David Baldacci
3. SHUTTER ISLAND, by Dennis Lehane
4. PLEASURE OF A DARK PRINCE, by Kresley Cole
5. THE SCARECROW, by Michael Connelly

Paperback Nonfiction

Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE BLIND SIDE, by Michael Lewis
2. THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
3. THE LOST CITY OF Z, by David Grann
4. ARE YOU THERE, VODKA? IT'S ME, CHELSEA, by Chelsea Handler
5. MY HORIZONTAL LIFE, by Chelsea Handler

Hardcover Advice

Top 5 at a Glance
1. SWITCH, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
2. THE KIND DIET, by Alicia Silverstone
3. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, by Gretchen Rubin
4. SO LONG, INSECURITY, by Beth Moore
5. MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING, VOL. 1, by Julia Child, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle

Paperback Advice

Top 5 at a Glance
1. FOOD RULES, by Michael Pollan
2. WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING, by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel
3. COOK THIS, NOT THAT!, by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding
4. THE BELLY FAT CURE, by Jorge Cruise
5. THE FIVE LOVE LANGUAGES, by Gary Chapman

Children's Books

Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE LION AND THE MOUSE, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney
2. THE EASTER EGG, written and illustrated by Jan Brett
3. CAT THE CAT, WHO IS THAT?, written and illustrated by Mo Willems
4. ALL THE WORLD, by Liz Garton Scanlon
5. WADDLE!, written and illustrated by Rufus Butler Seder

Graphic Books

Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE BOOK OF GENESIS: ILLUSTRATED, by R. Crumb
2. DARK TOWER: THE FALL OF GILEAD, by Robin Furth and Peter David
3. WOLVERINE: OLD MAN LOGAN, by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven
4. THE STAND: CAPTAIN TRIPS, by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Mike Perkins
5. BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE, by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland





www.nytimes.com/pages/books/bestseller/
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Pain Clinics: Oxycodone Addiction on the Rise


Oxycodone addiction continues to lead the pack as it relates to admissions to addiction rehab programs. While the drug’s addictive qualities certainly lends itself to perpetuate addiction, the amount of the drug prescribed by pain clinics makes it readily available. When patientes admitted to addiction rehab programs are interviewed during their admission process, many report their primary access to the Oxycodone was pain clinics. That’s right, pain clinics in plural. It has become common practice for those in need of “feeding” their Oxycodone addiction to frequent more than one pain clinic to obtain their Oxycodone.
Another patient seeking admission to a addiction rehab program reported that it was so easy for her to obtain the Oxycodone from pain clinics that she would frequent one pain clinic for her own personal needs and another pain clinic to obatin Oxycodone to sell. The lack of monitoring these clinics receive has made it fairly simple for those with an Ocycodone addiction to have several physicians prescribing for them.
If you are one of thoe people who have developed an Oxycodone addiction and want to break its cycle, it is highly reccomended you not discontinue this drug without inpatient medical supervision. Those with an Oxycodone addiction will undergo withdrawal which should be managed in a medical detox program located within a addiction rehab program. This way you can receive medical and psychological treatment for your addiction.

Source:
www.recoveryconnection.org

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Saturday, February 27, 2010

Just Like Mombot Used to Make

IN an empty fluorescent-lighted hallway on the second floor of Smith Hall here at Carnegie Mellon University, Prof. Paul Rybski and a pair of graduate students showed off their most advanced creation.

The culmination of two years of research and the collective expertise of 17 faculty members, undergraduates and doctoral students in the Human Robot Interaction Group, it is a robot outfitted with a $20,000 laser navigation system, sonar sensors and a Point Grey Bumblebee 2 stereo camera that functions as its eyes, which stare out from its clay-colored plastic, gender-neutral face.

With Dr. Rybski looking on like a proud parent, a bearded graduate student clacked away at a laptop on a roving service cart, and the robot rolled forward to fulfill its primary function: the delivery of one foil-wrapped Nature Valley trail-mix flavor granola bar.

“Hello, I’m the Snackbot,” it said in a voice not unlike that of HAL 9000, from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” as its rectangular LED “mouth” pulsated to form the words. “I’ve come to deliver snacks to Ian. Is Ian here?”

I responded affirmatively. “Oh, hello, Ian,” it said. “Here is your order. I believe it was a granola bar, right?”

Yes, it was. “All right, go ahead and take your snack. I’m sure it would be good, but I wouldn’t know. I prefer a snack of electricity.”

Designed to gather information on how robots interact with people (and how to improve homo-robo relations), the Snackbot has been carefully considered for maximum approachability in every detail, from its height to its color. The snack, not surprisingly, is the central component of that approachability.

“We figured, what better way to get people to interact with a robot than have something that offers them food?” Dr. Rybski said.

The Snackbot is but one soldier in a veritable army of new robots designed to serve and cook food and, in the process, act as good-will ambassadors, and salesmen, for a more automated future.



In 2006, after four years of research and more than a quarter-million-dollar investment, Fanxing Science and Technology, a company in Shenzhen, China, unveiled what was called the “world’s first cooking robot” — AIC-AI Cooking Robot — able, at the touch of a button, to fry, bake, boil and steam its way through thousands of Chinese delicacies from at least three culinary regions.

AIC-AI needs a special stove for cooking, but many of the mechanized culinary wizards developed since then can work on almost any kind of stove, as long as the robot is either shown ahead of time how a particular stove works or the stove’s characteristics are programmed into the robot’s software.

In 2008, scientists at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, came out with one such teachable chef, the Chief Cook Robot, which can make omelets (ham and Gruyère were in its first) and bears a resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy. That same year, at the Osaka Museum of Creative Industries in Japan, a programmable robot began preparing takoyaki (octopus balls) from scratch, a chef’s bandana wrapped jauntily around its upper module.
Last June, at the International Food Machinery and Technology Expo in Tokyo, a broad-shouldered Motoman SDA-10 robot with spatulas for arms made okonomiyaki (savory pancakes) for attendees; another robot grabbed sushi with an eerily realistic hand; and still another, the Dynamizer, sliced cucumbers at inhumanly fast speeds and occasionally complained about being tired and wanting to go home.

Then, a month later in Nagoya, Japan, the Famen restaurant opened, with two giant yellow robot arms preparing up to 800 bowls of ramen a day. When it’s slow, the robots act out a scripted comedy routine and spar with knives.

“The concept of this restaurant is that Robot No. 1 is the manager, which boils the noodles, and Robot No. 2 is the deputy manager, which prepares for soup and puts toppings,” said Famen’s owner, Kenji Nagaya. “Human staffs are working for the two robots.”

In the throes of an economic downturn, with unemployment rates mounting, the very idea of a robot chef might seem indulgent at best — at worst, downright offensive. But these robots aren’t likely to be running the grill stations or bringing you chowder anytime soon — and the bad economy might be part of the reason. At $100,000 a pair, Mr. Nagaya said, the cost of his robots is “too high to make bowls of ramen.”

Mikio Shimizu, the president of Squse, a company in Kyoto, Japan, that is responsible for the sushi-grabbing hand, said that his ultimate goal is to become the world’s largest maker of functional prosthetic hands.

Narito Hosomi, the president of Toyo Riki, a company in Osaka, Japan, that programs the robots responsible for the octopus balls and savory pancakes, said that the final destination for the robots, which cost $200,000 each, was more likely a factory than a kitchen.

But “it’s not interesting to watch robots welding,” Dr. Hosomi said. “If you see robots do the same work as you do in everyday life with the tools you use, it would be easier to understand the functional capability of robots. The okonomiyaki robot is a medium for that purpose. We say a robot can make okonomiyaki, takoyaki — well, what would you like a robot to do for you?”

While cooking is certainly a more universal way to showcase a robot’s abilities than, say, laser-welding, it is also unique in its ability to tackle something deeper: namely, the public’s collective “Terminator”- fueled angst over a future populated by vengeful hominoid machines.

Dr. Heather Knight, a roboticist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that the industry is trying to change “the perception of robots.”

“The Japanese have always been more comfortable with it, but particularly in the West, there’s this whole Frankenstein thing that if we try to make something in the image of man, to make a new creature, we’re stealing the role of God, and it’s going to turn out wrong because that’s not our role,” she said. “So how do you change this perception that robots are going to be way too intelligent and destroy us? One of the fastest ways to people’s hearts is food, right? Any girlfriend or wife would say that.”

In fact, Dr. Aude Billard, whose team designed the egg-handling Chief Cook Robot, said that she decided on omelets because “it was the first dish my partner cooked for me.” The omelet making was meant to show how a robot could be “taught” to accomplish complex tasks. It was also “something that all the guys in the lab knew sufficiently well to be able to train the robot,” she said.

But perhaps the biggest accomplishment of this new wave of sustenance-bearing machines is their departure from what defined their predecessors. The Fritz Lang level of efficiency normally associated with robots is notably absent — and that’s no accident.

“A simple rule of robotic personality seems to be: don’t make things the most efficient way,” said Magnus Wurzer, who has been running the Vienna-based Roboexotica, a festival where scientists have gone to build, showcase and discuss “cocktail robots” since 1999.

One entry, Beerbot, detects approaching people and asks for beer money. When it acquires enough, it “buys” itself a beer. Bystanders can watch it flow into a transparent bladder. As for other humanizing behaviors, “like a robot that doesn’t stop short at lighting a cigarette but actually goes ahead and smokes it?” Mr. Wurzer says, “We had that.”

Roboexotica has inspired a stateside version as well, which just had its third annual celebration in San Francisco.

And in at least one case in Europe, a robot actually got behind a bar. From 1999 to 2002, a scarlet-eyed metal robot named Cynthia poured drinks at Cynthia’s Bridge Bar and Lounge in London. But according to Mr. Wurzer, “she was too costly to maintain once the bar was sold by the robot’s maker.”

One reviewer at virtual-london.com, a travel-information Web site, said that Cynthia’s problems went deeper: “She whirls into action, pouring drinks to perfection, mixing them, recounting awful jokes and chuckling to herself while frightened customers feel grateful she’s not allowed out from behind the bar.”

However hard it may be to master, humanizing behavior was what the Snackbot’s creator were seeking, too.

“How do you get a service robot to interact with humans?” Dr. Rybski asked. “That’s a real hard problem. It’s different when you’re working with a human versus a pipe on an assembly line.”

To prepare, one of Dr. Rybski’s graduate students, a slender and quiet Korean woman named Min Kyung Lee, spent two days staked out behind a campus hot dog vendor, taking notes on how he interacted with his customers. She used what she learned to program the robot’s dialogue.

Aside from the obvious challenges of instilling a machine with personality is the other, long-held axiom in the world of robotics: what might seem second-nature to humans can be all but impossible to teach a machine.

Mr. Wurzer said that one scientist at Roboexotica built a robot solely dedicated to the preparation of mojitos — “with the grinding and stomping and all.” And yet the most challenging task for all the robots, he said, was probably the one thing that no human bartender ever botches: handling the ice.

The Chief Cook Robot still relies on human beings to crack the eggs — the shells are far too delicate for its metal hands. The okonomiyaki-making robot still needs the vegetables prepped, a task arguably better suited to a robot.

And while robots could certainly be developed and trained for these tasks, some culinary arts are so delicate and ancient — so venerated and sanctified — that even these machines’ creators wouldn’t trust them to inhuman hands.

“Would you like to have a robot hand that makes sushi?” said Mr. Shimizu, of Squse, which programmed the sushi-grabbing hand. “Do you really want it? For making good sushi, a robot never can beat a human professional sushi chef. A robot never can go beyond a human’s skill or human intelligence.”

But the real obstacle to a world full of mechanized sous-chefs and simulated rage-filled robo-Gordon Ramsays may be something much harder to fake: none of these robots can taste.

Keizo Shimamoto, who writes a blog on ramen noodles and has eaten at Famen, the two-robot Japanese restaurant, said that the establishment was “kind of dead” when he ate there last year. Though the owner said that people do taste the food, according to Mr. Shimamoto, “It was a little disappointing.”

It’s one thing to get people to stop by to see the robots. “But to keep the customers coming back,” he said, “you need better soup.”

Source:
www.nytimes.com
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Thursday, February 25, 2010

You’re So Vague: Carly Simon Lets Slip a Clue to Pop’s Great Mystery

The identity of the man who walked into the party like he was walking on to a yacht in Carly Simon’s 1972 hit You’re So Vain is one of pop’s greatest mysteries, matched only by the price of that doggie in the window and when, exactly, Luke Goss of Bros was famous.

After guarding the secret for 38 years, however, the singer has let slip the first name of the man who jilted her before going to Saratoga to watch his horse naturally win. Her indiscretion, which coincides with the release of her greatest hits album, appears in an instrumental interlude in an acoustic version of the song.

The name “David” is whispered, backwards, about two and a half minutes into the song. An excerpt of the reversed song is on Times Online.

Simon, 64, confirmed in an interview with Uncut magazine that the whisper alluded to her former lover. “I’m just going to tell you this,” she said. “The answer is on the new version of You’re So Vain. There’s a little whisper — and it’s the answer to the puzzle.”

Carly Simon and I go back a long way

Her confession, if genuine, rules out most of the candidates who have been considered favourites over the years. Warren Beatty, who briefly went out with Simon in the early 1970s, was considered by many, including himself, to be the one who flew his Learjet up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun. His mother was born and raised in Nova Scotia. In 1983 Simon said that her description sounded like Beatty. “He certainly thought it was about him. He called me and said, ‘Thanks for the song’.”

Other suspects have included Sir Mick Jagger, who sang backing vocals for the original song, and James Taylor, the American songwriter to whom Simon was married between 1972 and 1983, although she denied it was him.

Two Davids have been considered in the past, although both have been dismissed because of other clues given. David Cassidy, who rose to fame with The Partridge Family, was 22 when the song was written, but he had already cultivated a solo career and had a hit album. David Bowie has also been discussed. Simon said in 2003 and 2004, however, that the subject had the letters A, E and R in his name. This rules both Davids out unless their middle names are included. Bowie was born Duncan Robert Jones and Cassidy’s middle name is Bruce.

Other prominent Davids of the early 1970s include David Frost, David Soul and David (now Lord) Owen. A more credible candidate is David Crosby, formerly of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash, who was in Los Angeles at the same time as Simon.

Simon suggested in a 1989 interview that it was a composite of three men she knew while living in Los Angeles. She said in 1990: “It always strikes me as funny that people would be that into what I was thinking about. That’s the greatest ego trip anybody could have ... And for that very reason, of course, I can never give it away.”

A spokesman for her record company said: “That is all I know. After 38 years, we will never get a direct answer from Carly.”

Source:
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk
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BBC Signals an End to Era of Expansion

The BBC will close two radio stations, shut half its website and cut spending heavily on imported American programmes in an overhaul of services to be announced next month.

Mark Thompson, the Director-General, will admit that the corporation, which is funded by the £3.6 billion annual licence fee, has become too large and must shrink to give its commercial rivals room to operate.

In a wideranging strategic review, he will announce the closure of the digital radio stations 6 Music and Asian Network and introduce a cap on spending on broadcast rights for sports events of 8.5 per cent of the licence fee, or about £300 million.

He will also pledge to close BBC Switch and Blast!, leaving the lucrative teenage market to ITV and Channel 4. But BBC Three, which is aimed at 16 to 35-year-olds will not be touched.

The report is being considered by the corporation’s governing body, the BBC Trust, and is due to be made public next month.

It was drawn up by the corporation’s director of policy and strategy, John Tate, a former head of the Conservative policy unit, who co-wrote the party’s 2005 manifesto with David Cameron. It will be seen as an attempt to show a potential Tory government that the BBC understands the effect the deep advertising recession has had on commercial rivals and that it does not need outside intervention to get its house in order.

The proposals, which involve £600 million being redirected into higher-quality content, are based on the assumption that the licence fee will be frozen in 2013. All of the changes will be funded by closures and cutbacks in other services.

As part of a pledge to focus on quality over quantity, Mr Thompson will boost the BBC Two budget by £25 million and give the station a mandate to go upmarket. This will be funded by 25 per cent reduction in the corporation’s budget of £100 million for foreign acquisitions such as Mad Men and Heroes. BBC Trust sources said, however, that they would try to push the Director-General to a 33 per cent cut in the import budget.

The proposals appear to be calibrated to appease the BBC’s rivals in various markets. Broadcasters such as ITV and Channel 4 will be heartened by the corporation’s pledge to reduce teen programming and to scale back on its bidding for hit American shows.

The corporation’s web pages are to be halved, backed by a 25 per cent cut in staff numbers. Its £112 million budget will also be cut by 25 per cent. It is also pledging to include more links to newspaper articles to drive traffic to the websites of rival publishers.

The BBC will also try to calm the nerves of local newspaper groups — who are suspicious of the corporation after its aborted plans to develop video-driven local websites — with a pledge not ever to produce services at a “more local” level than is currently the case.

Its commercial subsidiary BBC Worldwide will be ordered to focus its activities overseas and dispose of its British magazines arm. This puts the future of publications such as Radio Times and Top Gear in doubt. It is not clear whether Worldwide would sell off its magazines division or instead put titles out to tender for rival publishers to produce.

With the closure of 6 Music, which has an average listener age of 35, and an undertaking to bring more documentaries and comedy to Radio 2, the BBC will also pledge to allow commercial stations to be the main providers of popular music to listeners aged 30 to 50. There will be complaints about the decision to cull 6 Music, which has a small but fervent fan base. Music industry tastemakers revere it as a credible outlet for “real music” but a review last month showed that only 20 per cent of adults knew that the station existed.The BBC will close two radio stations, shut half its website and cut spending heavily on imported American programmes in an overhaul of services to be announced next month.

Mark Thompson, the Director-General, will admit that the corporation, which is funded by the £3.6 billion annual licence fee, has become too large and must shrink to give its commercial rivals room to operate.

In a wideranging strategic review, he will announce the closure of the digital radio stations 6 Music and Asian Network and introduce a cap on spending on broadcast rights for sports events of 8.5 per cent of the licence fee, or about £300 million.

He will also pledge to close BBC Switch and Blast!, leaving the lucrative teenage market to ITV and Channel 4. But BBC Three, which is aimed at 16 to 35-year-olds will not be touched.

The report is being considered by the corporation’s governing body, the BBC Trust, and is due to be made public next month.

It was drawn up by the corporation’s director of policy and strategy, John Tate, a former head of the Conservative policy unit, who co-wrote the party’s 2005 manifesto with David Cameron. It will be seen as an attempt to show a potential Tory government that the BBC understands the effect the deep advertising recession has had on commercial rivals and that it does not need outside intervention to get its house in order.

The proposals, which involve £600 million being redirected into higher-quality content, are based on the assumption that the licence fee will be frozen in 2013. All of the changes will be funded by closures and cutbacks in other services.

As part of a pledge to focus on quality over quantity, Mr Thompson will boost the BBC Two budget by £25 million and give the station a mandate to go upmarket. This will be funded by 25 per cent reduction in the corporation’s budget of £100 million for foreign acquisitions such as Mad Men and Heroes. BBC Trust sources said, however, that they would try to push the Director-General to a 33 per cent cut in the import budget.

The proposals appear to be calibrated to appease the BBC’s rivals in various markets. Broadcasters such as ITV and Channel 4 will be heartened by the corporation’s pledge to reduce teen programming and to scale back on its bidding for hit American shows.

The corporation’s web pages are to be halved, backed by a 25 per cent cut in staff numbers. Its £112 million budget will also be cut by 25 per cent. It is also pledging to include more links to newspaper articles to drive traffic to the websites of rival publishers.

The BBC will also try to calm the nerves of local newspaper groups — who are suspicious of the corporation after its aborted plans to develop video-driven local websites — with a pledge not ever to produce services at a “more local” level than is currently the case.

Its commercial subsidiary BBC Worldwide will be ordered to focus its activities overseas and dispose of its British magazines arm. This puts the future of publications such as Radio Times and Top Gear in doubt. It is not clear whether Worldwide would sell off its magazines division or instead put titles out to tender for rival publishers to produce.

With the closure of 6 Music, which has an average listener age of 35, and an undertaking to bring more documentaries and comedy to Radio 2, the BBC will also pledge to allow commercial stations to be the main providers of popular music to listeners aged 30 to 50. There will be complaints about the decision to cull 6 Music, which has a small but fervent fan base. Music industry tastemakers revere it as a credible outlet for “real music” but a review last month showed that only 20 per cent of adults knew that the station existed.

Source:
www.timesonline.co.uk
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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

The Ten Best Sex Scenes in Mainstream Movies


The sex scene in this film perfectly reflects the black humour of the whole film. Joaquin Phoenix is trying to get over his mad ex-girlfriend, and picks up a waitress whom he takes home for sex. The scene climaxes with his crazy ex walking in and shooting his conquest in the back.
1 CLAY PIGEONS David Dobkin, 1998

The sex scene in this film perfectly reflects the black humour of the whole film. Joaquin Phoenix is trying to get over his mad ex-girlfriend, and picks up a waitress whom he takes home for sex. The scene climaxes with his crazy ex walking in and shooting his conquest in the back.
2 DON'T LOOK NOW Nicolas Roeg, 1973

The sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie is a classic and oozes sexiness - Roeg's cutting of the scene is beautiful.
3 PERFORMANCE Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970

I recreated the sex scene under the covers between Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg in a pop promo with Courtney Love, and she started crying.
4 INTIMACY Patrice Chéreau, 2001
This film is so strange, with its French art-house pretensions, and its setting in a London pub. The scene is when the guy gets a blow job, as it seems so blatant in the middle of an arty film.
5 BAISE-MOI Coralie, Virginie Despentes, 2000
The whole film is sexy, with Karen Lancaume and Raffaëla Anderson going on the rampage. The scene when they take two guys they've picked up back to the hotel and look across at each other during sex really turned me on.
6 THE PLAYER Robert Altman, 1992
The sex scene between Tim Robbins and Greta Scacchi is so cleverly done, the way you don't actually see any nudity, only their faces - it just adds to the sexual tension. And I have got a bit of a soft spot for Greta Scacchi...
AMÉLIE POULAINJean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001
This is probably my favourite sex scene in a film. It's the bit when Audrey Tautou contemplates how many people are having orgasms at any one point, followed by the shots of various people in the throes of a climax. It's so incredible. I have recreated that in a pop promo, too.
8 THE HUNGER Tony Scott, 1983
The opening sequence is amazing, with Susan Sarandon performing her experiments on monkeys, cutting to David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve picking up a couple of swingers in a club and taking them back to their house where they kill them in a sexual act. As you can tell, I'm fascinated by the juxtaposition of life and death in these murderous sex scenes.
9 LOOKING FOR MR GOODBAR Richard Brooks, 1977

Diane Keaton is great in this film, as a successful teacher of deaf children during the day who, after a short and unhappy affair, starts to spend her nights cruising bars. Her craving first for sex, but later also for drugs, leads into increasingly demeaning and dangerous situations, and the final scene sees her being killed during sex.
10 GET CARTER Mike Hodges, 1971

The scene in which Michael Caine indulges in phone sex with Britt Ekland is great, especially the way that his unresolved desperation after she puts the phone down leads to him sleeping with the old landlady. I love the bit when they wake up together to the sound of a kazoo band - hilarious!
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Welcome to FarmVille: Population 80 million



How did virtual chickens, £10 tractors and acres of soya beans become the world's biggest video game?


ByTim Walker 


My strawberries have withered. I planted them this morning, after acquiring the seeds for the bargain price of 10 coins and being assured of their profitability as a crop.

But I let the day get the best of me – I had work to do, lunch to eat, emails to read – and when I finally returned to check on my plot, the fruit had flourished, matured and died in the space of just a few short hours. This is not the real world, and these were not some mutant GM strawberries; in fact, they weren't really strawberries at all. This is FarmVille, a Facebook game for which I've been tilling digital soil all week, planting crops made up of mere bytes and pixels.

Perhaps you've only heard of FarmVille from your cluttered Facebook news feed, informing you that so-and-so has just planted their 15th field of soybeans, or built their first barn, or earned a brightly coloured ribbon in recognition of their virtual agricultural achievements. Perhaps you've joined one of the Facebook groups that have been created in protest at the game's pervasiveness. But your protests would be in vain: FarmVille, the world's biggest social game, has almost 80 million players – that's around 20 per cent of all Facebook users; more people than use Twitter or, indeed, live in the UK. Some 30 million of them tend their crops daily.

When the site allowed its gamers to exchange virtual Valentine gifts online, 220m were sent and accepted within 18 hours; to get that into perspective, it's worth noting that Hallmark sells approximately 200m e-cards over the entire Valentine season.

The object of FarmVille (which was recently launched as a standalone game for Facebook-refuseniks on Microsoft's MSN Games platform) is to build and maintain your own virtual farm – pay virtual coins for seeds, plant virtual crops and earn virtual profits. As the game goes on, players can gross enough to buy tractors and livestock, construct outbuildings and expand their plot well beyond the borders of their browser window. The key to its success is social: if a player persuades their Facebook acquaintances to become their FarmVille "neighbours", they can be rewarded for fertilising their friends' fields or feeding their hogs.

Once, online gaming was the preserve of youngish men in darkened bedrooms, studying strategy guides for World of Warcraft and Halo. Now, thanks to FarmVille and other games like it, that demographic has shifted dramatically towards the mainstream, taking in office workers and stay-at-home mums, children and their grandparents. A recent survey concluded that today's average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman. Crucially for its players, it is free to join FarmVille and you can enjoy a long and fruitful relationship with the game without ever spending a (real) penny.

Crucially for its creators, there's a second option: you can use your real-world credit card to buy virtual goods and stay ahead of your friends in the FarmVille rankings. Most of these digital products are reasonably priced, but among the Valentine gifts on offer was a limited edition, $50 "diamond ring", which protects its recipient's crops from withering in perpetuity. My strawberries are still dead; romance, it would appear, is not.

***

FarmVille was reared by the world's most successful stable of online social games, Zynga, which was founded in San Francisco in July 2007 and already has more than 500 employees and an estimated annual revenue of around $150m (£97m). Mark Pincus, its 43 year-old founder and CEO – who named the company after his deceased bulldog – is a serial web entrepreneur whose previous businesses include the early social network Tribe. "Our intent when we founded Zynga," he says, "was to design a gaming experience for the mass market. Back in 2007 nobody offered games on the web that were available and accessible to everyone. They were confined to niches of hardcore gamers."

Thanks to Pincus's connections, Zynga's launch was supported by some of the smartest money in Silicon Valley. Once it became clear how profitable social gaming was going to be, more cash followed. One Russian finance group, which also invested heavily in Facebook, recently backed Zynga to the tune of $180m. That investment looks like being a good one; including FarmVille, Zynga today boasts 230 million monthly active game users. Among their other successes are Café World (a restaurant management title that's the world's second biggest social game, with more than 30 million users), Mafia Wars, Fishville and Texas Hold-Em Poker – all of them ranked in the top 10 social gaming applications of 2009. As well as Facebook, Zynga's games also populate MySpace and the iTunes App Store.

Zynga may dominate its market, but it's not the only game in town. The London-based Playfish, for instance, owns Facebook games with combined player numbers of more than 50 million, prompting a massive traditional games firm, Electronic Arts, to acquire it (for more than $300m) in December. Zynga has made no bones about copying the successes of its smaller rivals, and Pincus was always a fan of farm games such as Farm Town – by the developers Slashkey – which looks and sounds eerily familiar to FarmVille fans. FarmVille itself was launched quietly on 19 June, 2009. Zynga's staff expected that about 2,500 of their friends and family might take it up overnight. Instead, the game had 25,000 users within 24 hours. A week later, FarmVille's population was more than one million.

***

The continued success of The Archers should be evidence enough that people are fascinated by farms, whether they live in the country or not. Though the game bears almost no relation to real farming and its concerns, Pincus attributes FarmVille's fanbase to an urban fantasy of owning one's own smallholding. "I've lived in a little row house in the middle of San Francisco for 14 years," he says, "but I dream of having my own organic farm with lots of space, and animals running around. I think that might be the ultimate fantasy for anyone who's cooped up in an office all day. It's also universally acceptable: you can show somebody a field and, whether they live in China or Manhattan, and whether it's your grand- mother or your niece, they'll all know what they're supposed to do with it."

Farms are a compelling daydream, agrees Tom Chatfield, the author of Fun Inc: Why Games Are The 21st Century's Most Serious Business: "Psychologically, people like greenery; they like having grass, water and sky on their computer screens. But FarmVille is also very good at demanding your time, forcing you to tend your crops. It's like a virtual pet, a Tamagotchi; you have to nurture it and look after it every day."


Cassandra Innes, an MBA graduate from London, is 49 and a FarmVille addict. "Normal business principles apply to FarmVille," she insists. "It's a strategic process. But you have to decide whether you just want to get rich quick, or whether having fun is part of the process. It's not enjoyable if it's just about grabbing as many coins as possible." No strawberries are permitted to wither in the Innes household: when her partner accidentally planted a field full of them in the evening, Cassandra set her alarm for 3am so that she could wake to harvest them as they ripened. "FarmVille reminds me of the toy farm I had as a child," she says, "We'd make our own buildings out of cardboard and spend our money on the animals. My 19-year-old daughter, who's my neighbour on FarmVille, says she's grown up with The Sims and other computer games, and she sees FarmVille as a free version of that."

Maya Forrester, a 39-year-old human resources executive with 57 FarmVille neighbours, is less romantic about her reasons for loving the game. "It's the competition that got me hooked," she says. "I don't have a farm fantasy, but FarmVille fulfils my inner need to beat my Facebook frenemies."

***

The power of online social games first became apparent in 2007, with the spectacular rise and fall of Scrabulous, a wildly popular Facebook game that imitated Scrabble to such a degree that Hasbro had it shut down; for a while Scrabulous catered to half a million users daily. Facebook had opened its site to external developers that year, allowing anyone with the necessary programming nous to create add-on games, services and other applications for its users' accounts. FarmVille relies on Facebook for its existence, and without the social network its success would have been impossible.

"With Scrabulous," explains Chatfield, "people realised that a social platform like Facebook gives people ways to show off to, or compete with, their friends. It's so much more engaging to do something with people you know than to do it with strangers. You can cheat if you're playing online with strangers, but playing with friends is an incentive to be fair, and that brings the emotional rewards of competition. FarmVille is in the tradition of family board games, as are many of the most successful social games. These are not high-production, high-budget, high involvement games like World of Warcraft or Halo. They're low-risk, low-barrier games. Lots of people are playing FarmVille who never played a proper videogame before, but now might."

"Social" videogames have already found a place in the family home with the success of the Nintendo Wii console and family-friendly music games like Guitar Hero. But online social gaming allows people to enjoy that traditional gaming experience with friends anywhere in the world. Significantly, Scrabulous did not require its players to be online at the same time; like FarmVille, they could check their game's progress at intervals. This, says Chatfield, "was a way to get people playing one another across time as well as space."

Cassandra Innes has even made new friends via FarmVille, after visiting fan sites in search of neighbours. "I introduced one of them to my sister because they had similar interests," she admits. "I find myself talking to my family more about our nutty farms than about normal things. We have long phone calls about it. The farm is like a comfort zone; it's easier to communicate about that than about who's going where for Christmas."

Thanks not only to social networking, but to the rise of mobile digital marketplaces like the iTunes App Store, casual gaming is expected to explode even further in the coming months and years. Positive buzz surrounds Glitch, a forthcoming "MMORPG" (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) whose developers claim the puzzle-solving sci-fi title will bridge the gap between FarmVille and World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, the Apple iPad and its imitators will make perfect platforms for casual online games. "[Those devices] will let people play games with high fun and social delivery," says Chatfield, "but which can be done in small amounts of time, picked up and put down, with long-term aims to keep you hooked."

Where else but FarmVille could you spend a tenner on a tractor and have enough change for a horse and a bag of aubergine seeds? And where else, you may ask, would anyone be prepared to spend real money on a farm vehicle that appeared only as an icon on their computer screen? Analysts agreed that the worldwide market in virtual goods was worth $6bn last year, with games accounting for 75 per cent of that figure. Customers at the Facebook gift shop, which is full of useless objects rendered even more useless by their non-existence, spent $150m.

Then again, few people question the success of the iTunes App Store, which has shifted more than 3bn downloads in less than two years – many of them no more elevating than an electronic whoopee cushion, or a fake glass of beer. "The concept of spending money on virtual goods ought not to be as foreign as it sounds," Pincus insists. "Most things that we buy are based on virtual perceptions anyway, whether it's a branded orange juice or a watch. If you go to a movie, that's an entertainment experience that you can't take with you."

According to Pincus, FarmVille derives more than 90 per cent of its income from virtual goods, but the ways it earns the other 10 per cent have caused controversy. "Zynga is very aggressive about finding techniques to keep people coming back and spending money on games," explains Chatfield. "They compel you to feed a virtual beast." Zynga's CEO was once quoted as saying that in the company's early days, he "did every horrible thing in the book, just to get revenues." An early Facebook poker game from Zynga allowed players to spend real money on their chips – but not to cash out. Those "horrible things" that Pincus may or may not have been referring to, however, were so-called "lead generators": in-game ads offering players FarmVille cash in return for filling in a survey or similar. The survey would ask users to give their phone number and create a password, and the user would thus unwittingly sign up to some unwanted subscription service that added mysterious charges to their phone bills. These scams earned Zynga the ire of Silicon Valley's most powerful tech blogger, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, and Zynga and Facebook are now defendants in a federal class-action lawsuit.

Since the criticism, the company has cleaned up its act and removed all the offending ads, which it insists had been allotted their slots by third-party advertising networks, not by Zynga itself. Now every FarmVille ad comes from a small list of top brands, vetted personally by Pincus and his team. "We want to build a service that people will love and trust and keep using for many years – and feel comfortable letting their children use," says Pincus. "So we took those criticisms very seriously, not just for us but for the growth of social gaming."

There are some positive uses of the virtual goods economy, besides the simple pleasure it affords its users, and Zynga's founder is keen to emphasise its benevolent possibilities. Even before the recent earthquake, the company supported charities in Haiti. But when the disaster struck, Zynga introduced a new crop to FarmVille – sweet seeds – the profits from which were channelled into the aid effort. Within five days, FarmVille alone had raised $1m. "Because there are no costs attached to each individual virtual good sold, we can afford to do it," Pincus explains. "If we can productise causes or doing good, it would be good for the business, the user and someone else – and it could be a billion-dollar business."

***

Back in FarmVille, the players are concerned with simpler things than lead generators. Maya disapproves of some of her neighbours' approach to agriculture; particularly the factory-style farmers who sacrifice their integrity in favour of easy profits. Cassandra, meanwhile, is worried for the welfare of FarmVille's animals. "Some of my neighbours' farms are awful," she says. "Their whole plot is given over to crops, and their cows and horses are all squashed into a corner with no room to move. The game should be structured so that it's more animal-friendly and you get punished for having too many battery chickens."

Pincus would no doubt be overjoyed by the sincerity of his players' views on the game. "To be that impactful on, and that representative of, the culture totally excites me and my team," he says. "I love the idea that we can put out a game that's as popular as Seinfeld."
Parallel worlds: The top online games

World of Warcraft

WoW is the mother of all MMORPGs (that's "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" to you and me), and more than 11.5 million players have been sucked into the Warcraft world since it was first launched in 2004. The game's users pay a subscription for the privilege of becoming a sword-wielding knight of the digital realm. After choosing a character avatar to control, they wander through a fantasy world of trolls, orcs and assorted monsters, taking on quests and interacting with fellow players, often collaborating in order to complete said quests. And if they die on the way, they even have the option of resurrection. Lucky, that.

Scrabulous

This online version of Scrabble began life in India in 2005, the creation of the Scrabble-loving Agarwalla brothers. When Facebook opened its platform to third-party developers in 2007, the network of Scrabulous lovers expanded to 500,000 daily users, with more than 800,000 people adding the game to their Facebook accounts. After Hasbro (which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America) and Mattel (which owns them for the rest of the world) noted the game's success, they tried to purchase Scrabulous, and then took legal action to shut it down. Scrabulous is now known as Lexulous, with minor differences in gameplay – and far fewer users.

Second Life

The virtual world of Second Life is not, technically speaking, a game. It has the same social pull as FarmVille, but none of the competitive goals. Its 18 million "residents" instead go shopping, hang out with friends, work, trade and even have romantic entanglements. Sort of like real life, but without its consequences – or pleasures. The world has its own currency, the Linden Dollar, which is worth around 400 Linden to every £1. Last year it was revealed that thanks to their online trading nous, a number of players had even become Second Life millionaires. The virtual world was the creation of California entrepreneur Philip Rosedale, whose avatar within the game is known as Philip Linden.

Pet Society

Pet Society is the most successful game produced by Zynga's closest rival, Playfish. Played, like FarmVille, via Facebook, it allows users not to nurture a patch of land, but a series of animals, customising their appearances and keeping them fed and groomed. They can also persuade their pets to socialise with one another and earn "Paw Points" accordingly. Just as in the real pet economy, the virtual one gives owners a vast array of products for their pet to choose from, be it a garden to run around in, or a Jacuzzi to bathe in. Despite having almost 19 million users, Pet Society remains outside the Top 10 Facebook applications.

MyTown

MyTown has been described as "Monopoly for the real world". An iPhone app that mixes the digital world with the outside one, it works along similar lines to the "location-based" social network FourSquare, which allows its users to "check-in" to geographical locations. MyTown, on the other hand, allows you to "buy" and manage virtual versions of your favourite venues. Created by developers Booyah, the game now has more than 800,000 users.

Source:
www.independent.co.uk
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