Men and Near-Men of the Year

Wow... nothing posted since May 27. It would seem that my life got super-exciting since then and took me away from the keyboard. In fact, all that happened was that I was quite busy with consulting work from August to early November, and that we got a puppy in July. Other that that, it's the usual reason: procrastination. And perhaps a lack of something really exciting or infuriating to write about.

I received the TIME Magazine "Person of the Year" edition (and yes, I wrote "Men" in this post's title because I'm only going to talk about men here) and I was thinking of the meaning of some of the choices.

I've already heard the Luddites say that it was preposterous to bestow such a high honor on Mark Zuckerberg, but I think the point is that regardless of his actual personal qualities or limitations (disclosure: I have not seen The Social Network) the phenomenon that he and his company created is of great importance. I consult and write professionally about the importance of social media in the enterprise, and about the fact that companies that try to create an internal social network fail to realize that their employees want to be connected to a mix of colleagues and non-colleagues. Since Facebook and LinkedIn are the primary places that meet this need, they will not become faithful to an internal-only site. My latest paper on this, "If You Build It, They Won't Come" will be published by the Cutter Consortium after the turn of the year.

Now don't take me wrong: I'm interested in this enough that next time I walk by Antonio's Nut House, which is a couple of blocks from where I lived in Palo Alto in 1985-88 and 1993-2000, I may drop in to see if Mr. Zuckerberg is there (he may have to change his unofficial headquarters now that TIME has disclosed this habit), because I would absolutely not mind an autograph. It would be a change from my usual ballet dancers and violinists... OK, violinist. But Facebook (and LinkedIn) are now much bigger phenomena than any boy genius, and will probably not depend on their respective founders to continue (the usual counter-example to this is Stevc Jobs, of course).

The Chilean miners, los trenta y tres, almost made it. Some of them were truly heroic, others were well inspired to follow their leaders' advice. They are important not so much as 33 individual men, but because it showed how a country and the victims could take charge of a rescue operation that some thought was doomed from the start. The "Heckuva job, Brownie" exclamation was a gross sign of incompetence at all levels in the U.S. in 2005. Next time there is a Katrina-like catastrophe in this country, I hope we ask some of these miners, and perhaps the President of Chile and his cabinet, to come here and coordinate the rescue, since they know a thing or two about actually succeeding at a rescue.

And now, the man whose near-designation may be controversial, but who deserves some discussion: Julian Assange. Once again, here is a person who seems to have some deep flaws, and who is alleged to be a repeat sex offender; but regardless of his personality, he is the visible face of a movement to expose diplomatic secrets. I am quite perturbed, frankly, by the attitude of governments and banks toward the Wikileaks organization and even toward Assange himself. First, it has not been proven that Wikileaks participants procured any information illegally. The people who gave them the information may have violated their terms of employment by various governments, so go after them if you have legal standing, but don't blame the messenger.

Secondly, I find the diplomatic niceties tiresome. We all know that foreign dignitaries, be it Karzai, Merkel, or Sarkozy, are not angels. I find it refreshing to hear about the incompetence of the first, the imperiousness of the second, and the vanity of the third. Instead of suing someone for revealing this, the U.S. diplomats should say "oops" and move on, and the big shots who have been described in unflattering terms should look at what they can do to govern more competently or more humbly.

Thirdly, and the TIME article on Assange points it clearly, the financial institutions clearly acquiesced to apply punitive measures to Wikileaks as soon as Ms. Clinton's organization cleared its powerful throat. Paypal suspended processing payments because of "illegal activity" even though it is an allegation that has not been proven. Visa and Mastercard stopped too, even though they still let the Ku Klux Klan have accounts with them. And a Swiss bank has frozen Mr. Assange's account because he is not a permanent resident of Switzerland -- a rule they constantly overlook in other cases. This is just spineless capitulation and, until and unless an actual illegal action has been proven, a sad day for freedom of speech.

Even the fact that he was arrested in London just after the outcry from the U.S. government seems rather suspicious. I can imagine the debates at Scotland Yard: "if we arrest him now, we'll be called lackeys of the U.S. If we don't arrest him, we may be derelict in our duty. Oh, what to do, what to do? Here's an idea: let's arrest him and then free him up on bail. Let's see how this plays out."

So this Person of the Year issue is more interesting than the usual crop. I was especially glad that the designation didn't go to some Tea Party politician, because I doubt that we will remember them much in a few years, and it would have been another U.S.-centric story. Instead, in all the cases I mentioned (Zuckerberg, the miners, and Assange) we have people whose actions have inspired or disturbed the entire world, and who evoke in us some fundamental values that are not only American: connectedness, the love of life, and the right to know what our governments would like to hide.

Another Houston Ballet evening

Woohoo, I got another autographed program cover. Ian Casady (at left) danced the role of Pecos Bill in Pecos by Stanton Welch, and I got him to sign the program bearing his photograph in that role. I say "role" because the piece was more theatrical than anything else, an impression Ian agreed with.

That piece closed a program that started with Ballo della Regina by Balanchine, which pleased one of my companions, since she learned classical ballet for eight years, but was too old-fashioned for me. And as fun as Pecos Bill was, I far preferred the middle part of the program, Sandpaper Ballet, a very abstract piece by Mark Morris, set to Leroy Anderson's music, including such whimsical pieces as Sleigh Ride, the Typewriter, and others.

A Volcano and a Goat

I flew to Paris almost two weeks ago. My plane left Houston five and a half hours late, and arrived in Paris seven hours late. The cause of course, was the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, whose name I can't resist writing since I can spell it without looking it up anymore.

Yesterday morning, I took a train from Paris to Poitiers, where I changed to another train from Poitiers to Angoulême, in order to have lunch with an ex-colleague of mine. The second train, which was coming from Brussels, arrived five minutes late in Poitiers, but then stopped for 20 minutes in the middle of nowhere and arrived in Angoulême 27 minutes late. No, there wasn't an ash cloud along the track: the train ahead of us had hit a goat that was standing on the tracks. Goat against TGV: no contest here. Still, it's probably a good thing that the trains on that section go at about 125 mph (200 kph), not their usual 185 mph (300 kph).

When I was told about the reason for the train delay, I found it rather funny that while a mighty volcano can cause thousands of flights to be canceled and 200,000 passengers to be stranded for days, a humble goat, in the wrong place at the wrong time, can create a smaller commotion, delaying over 1,000 people (between the two trains, assuming it didn't cause an even worse ripple effect) by half an hour.

Newsworthiness or Prejudice?

I posted a first version of this article last week in French. After the situation evolved, and considering my international readers (yes, all two of you), here is an updated version in English.

When I received the e-mail notifying me of the publication of the newsletter of the French Consulate in Houston, Le Trait d'Union (the title means "The Hyphen," but the French phrase evokes the sense of "connection" better than the English word, and therefore implies that it is a means to connect the local French community), I was surprised that one of its articles was entitled Portrait of Annise Parker, First Homosexual Woman in the Houston City Hall.

Upon reading the content, it was clear that while it stated her history, competence, and summed up her campaign, the newly elected mayor's sexual orientation was indeed a key aspect for the author. The article was certainly positive in its tone, but I tended to dismiss this as rather insignificant, because how else was an official publication of a foreign government going to talk about the mayor of its host city anyway? But the tabloid title rubbed me the wrong way.

I then discovered that the newsletter contained no link to respond to the editor, which made me feel like the Consulate only cared about one-way communication, a very "regal" French way of doing things (the French actually use the word régalien to refer to things that authorities do in a way that is reminiscent of the omnipotent kings).

So I composed my very critical (surprise!) response to the Consulate as an open letter, which I posted here and was reflected in my Facebook status. A local French friend saw this, and sent me the contact information for the Consulate's press service, to which I sent the same message in an e-mail. I very quickly got an e-mail back from an official, containing a personal response from the Consul General, Mr. Grandjouan, and I had a nice phone discussion with the gentleman who had relayed the response.

The gist of the reply was that many publications has focused on the new mayor's orientation; that she was very open about being a lesbian; and that it was important to mention this because people tend to have a false image of all Texans as very conservative people. Therefore, the argument went, the article was trying to point out how positive and progressive her election was.

While I acknowledge that there was probably no actual prejudice at work here, and I appreciate the communication effort and the personal attention the Consul gave to my criticism, I still think that the focus on "first gay woman in City Hall" in the title was inappropriate. It would have been fine to talk in the article about the "conservatism" issue. For example, the writer could have written that Ms. Parker has long served the local community as an openly gay woman, that her sexual orientation was not an issue in the campaign (until a last-minute desperate maneuver by her opponent), and that her victory demonstrates that Houstonians are not as socially conservative as people tend to depict Texans in general. This would have been fine in the body of the piece — but you can't claim that something is a non-issue... then try to grab the reader's attention by making it an issue worthy of the headline.

It is also a little ironic that a French publication refers to the sexuality of the Houston mayor in a headline in 2010, given that in 2001 Paris elected a mayor whose homosexuality was public knowledge since 1998. It almost sounded like the author of the article on Ms. Parker had not heard of Mr. Delanoë.

More generally, this reminded me of the general debate about invisibility vs. recognition in the LGBT community. Some people might point out that we are in general trying to be recognized for our presence, contributions, and need of equality. But equality precisely implies that our sexual orientation should not be newsworthy — it is its still-rampant denial that should be.

Of course, what is and should be much more important to the French representatives in Houston, and was completely omitted from the article, is this: in the current climate of a still lingering recession, what will the new mayor do to control its impact on her city? And incidentally, how can the strong French community in Houston, including all the French who work in the Oil & Gas industry, be involved in a mutually beneficial manner in the economic workings of this city?

Apollo, Hush, and Fancy Free

After a bit of a dry spell, I went to the Houston Ballet tonight and saw three good pieces. And since the season's Playbill has Connor Walsh on the cover, about whom I wrote before ("Arts and Politics, part II" on February 23, 2008, and "Icing on the Cake" on November 7 of the same year), I came back with a little prize besides having seen a great performance:

All three pieces had the common quality of combining great choreographers with great musicians. Apollo is by George Balanchine, on music by Stravinsky. However, composed in 1928, this is both relatively early Stravinsky and very early Balanchine. Interestingly, this means the score is more classical — not sense-jarring and almost cacophonous like the Rite of Spring — while the choreography is more modern than what Balanchine became known for later, even though it is based on Greek mythology. At least I was positively surprised.

Hush is by Christopher Bruce, who also choreographed Swang Song, the piece danced by Mr. Walsh that I commented on in my post two years ago. The dancing, while inventive, did not strike me as particularly extraordinary, but the accompaniment by Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, with McFerrin's amazing ability to make his voice sounds like various sorts of musical instruments, added an extra dimension.

Fancy Free is a fascinating piece, not only because of its inherent qualities, but because it was premiered in 1944, and one might have almost found it sacrilegious to feature sailors on leave while WW II was still going on. But the other interesting aspect is that while it is a very traditional "boys chase girls" story, the guys try to win the girls by demonstrating their not-very-macho footsteps, there are gestures that hint at the traditional semi-funny, semi-homophobic jokes that guys can make about each other... and then both the music and the dance were composed by two of the biggest closet queens in New York's so-very-gay artistic world, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein!

I got my autograph in the Wortham Center's Green Room after the performance, and had time to chat a little with Mr. Walsh. I complimented him on giving a very complex dimension to his character in Fancy Free: especially during the duo dance with one of the girls, his sailor had at times the cocksure attitude you would expect of a slightly drunk sailor on leave in New York; at times, the hesitancy and shyness of a corn-fed boy who doesn't know what to do in a new world; and finally, a big grin on his face that says "I can't believe what's happening to me!" He said, in different words, that there was indeed a conscious attempt to layer several personality aspects onto the character, and he seemed genuinely pleased to be told that it had come across successfully.

Unholy Mix

A few months ago, I joined a LinkedIn group of small business owners in the "Houston Bay Area" — which means the area between Houston and Galveston, including places like Pearland, Clearlake, and the rest of the area around NASA's Johnson Space Center. I'm not based in that specific suburbia, but it's only a 25-mile drive from my Houston location to NASA, which depending on the time of the day can take between 30 minutes and infinity. As a fledgling independent consultant with existing connections in Houston, I figured the networking could be useful.

The group leader soon started organizing in-person meetings at a Mexican cantina near NASA. After missing the first opportunities, I went to a happy hour in January. My initial impressions were cautiously favorable: while many people were in unrelated fields (construction, real estate, insurance) there were a few members doing IT work. They were not directly competing with me, so there seemed to be good cross-selling opportunities. There were also contract personnel agencies, and while they typically deal with clerical and accounting positions, I thought they might occasionally need to find a part-time IT expert for a client, which I could do for a few days, even if it was "filler work" at a lower rate than usual. Business cards were exchanged, and I went to a second time for a luncheon meeting in February. I volunteered to give a not-too-geeky talk about IT trends at the March 11 lunch, a proposal which was accepted with very positive feedback.

About a week before my talk, as I was putting the finishing touches to my presentation, I got e-mails telling me that a couple of new posts had been added to the group's discussion board. I went to the site, and discovered a message from a pastor, asking the rest of us something about how we would answer God if he met us at the "pearly gates" and asked us some question I have now forgotten. The second post, by the group's manager, Mary Sullivan, was to re-emphasize the pastor's message and tell us to re-read it and think about it. And then there was a third message, by another member who said that yes, he had re-read the question, and would still be able to answer God in the affirmative.

At that point, I wrote a polite but a bit "challenging" message, saying that while I respected everyone's beliefs, this discussion had nothing to do with the purpose of the group, and that it should be taken offline. I remarked that I was aware that some Christians tend to assume, in this very religious country, that everyone else is one too, and that it is okay to mix religion and work. However, I pursued, this is not okay because people from other religions, or with no religion at all, would feel discriminated against, and at any rate this was the "Houston Bay Area LinkedIn Group," not the "Houston Bay Area Christian LinkedIn Group."

At this point, Mary Sullivan replied that she wasn't going to change the direction of the group (which she did not restate, which was convenient since she would have been hard pressed to find any mention of a religious focus or assumption in the group's mission statement). She stated that my remarks indicated that I was intolerant of Christians. She informed me that she had asked the pastor who has posted the initial note to open the next meetings with a prayer; and that, since she did not want me to feel "uncomfortable" at that point, she had already secured an alternate speaker to replace me on March 11.

I sent a quick reply, where I remained polite but pointed out her hypocrisy (she had cancelled my talk, so who was being intolerant of whom?) and immediately thereafter I left the LinkedIn group, as it seemed the most appropriate course of action to avoid further confrontation and move on to more productive things.

As far as I am concerned, the incident is closed. I actually hope their group falters because I think it is a disservice to its members to have hijacked it for a hidden religious agenda. It was dishonest to create the group and invite people in the first place without clearing stating the assumption that members were Christians who wanted to discuss their business in the context of their faith (or vice versa). It may seem mean-spirited to wish them failure, but my point is that the sooner the group makes itself irrelevant, which may or may not happen given that this is Texas after all, another group can be formed to fill the void — one that will be unrelated to the practice of any specific religion and will serve its stated business networking purposes directly and honestly. If such a group gets formed at some point, I am certainly interested in joining it.

Oh, and my slides on "IT Trends" are ready, and will remain current for a little while!

I have an amazing friend

Well, okay, before you all explode in recriminations, I have lots of amazing friends.

But today I want to talk about one of them specifically. We are both on the board of Stanford Pride, and he is a third-year medical student at Columbia University in New York. His name is Bryan McColgan.

Bryan finds the time, even on days when he spent many hours in the pediatrics department or in the emergency room, to share his life as a medical student, and the important things he is learning, with anyone who cares. He does this on Twitter (his feed) a few times each day, and he also has a video log on Blogspot (here).

I'm almost addicted to his tweets, because they make me realize how complicated medicine is, how intimately connected it is to our society and civilization (e.g., his posts about how parents who look up symptoms on the Internet bring their children to the emergency room convinced that they have an extra rare serious disease, or the way overweight teenagers are victimized by their peers instead of getting encouragement), but also because on a personal basis I am discovering that Bryan is an exceptional individual.

He spent several months in Zimbabwe a couple of years ago, and has developed a deep appreciation and compassion for the plight of people who suffer from bad health care, malnutrition, and a criminally negligent, incompetent and/or corrupt government. And he so much wants to help, that I'm sure he'd go back to Africa in a heartbeat when he finishes his studies... except for the slight problem that he will be at least a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt from the cost of his medical studies. When you watch his videos and read his tweets, you really feel the goodness of this guy coming at you through the screen, and the next minute you're laughing when he tells you how cool it is when urologists blast kidney stones with lasers as if they were zapping aliens in a video game!

Anyway, instead of me continuing, you just need to do yourself a favor and read his tweets or watch his video clips. I guarantee you'll learn something, and one of them will be how immensely talented and generous some people can be.

Speechful People

I went to see Tim Miller perform his monologue "Lay of the Land" at the Vortex Theatre in Austin on January 29. After the performance, I bought him a glass of red wine, to make sure he would recognize me, since that was my excuse to introduce myself last time he had performed here, and was a prelude to a faithful-if-distant Facebook acquaintance with him.

Tim was of course surrounded by admirers, but he kept introducing me to them as "my friend Claude" so that gave me an excuse to hang around for a while. Two of the people who were talking to him, Melissa and Kile ("legally it's Kyle, but in life I spell it Kile, it's my one act of rebellion," he told a judge at the tournament I will talk about later), are part of the UT Speech program, which is not in the Drama department as one might suspect, but in the Communications department. Kile talked about work done with high-school students, for which Tim's monologues were one of the sources, which I found fascinating given how much "in your face" Tim's work can be.

So I asked Kile and Melissa more about the UT Speech program, because I really had no idea what this whole subculture is (since then, I've mentioned this to a couple of people, who both said "oh yes, I used to do this when I was in college"). They said that there is a whole schedule of contests between colleges in different cities, and that in the fall in particular, they are at some event in Houston almost every week-end. They advised me to look at the program's Web site. I then e-mailed the team's director, Randy Cox, to ask if there was a schedule of upcoming events. He said the season was essentially over, but that there was a contest at Texas A&M during the week-end of February 6-7. Since I was planning to drive from Austin to Houston on the 7^th anyway, I decided to make a detour through College Station and see what this was all about.

I ended up attending two of the finals, and was fascinated by this world that was unknown to me until then. The one thing I still do not understand is why these speech tournaments take place in basement rooms and are not made into public events, which might attract donations and at least publicity.

Imagine a bunch of college kids (mostly young men, although there were a few women, and there was some good diversity in terms of ethnic origins), wearing suits and ties, carrying small vinyl binders the size of a book. This makes the men at least look like preachers! The little black book contains the script or story from which they perform, although they have almost totally memorized their texts, so they only refer to the book on rare occasions to jog their memory, or use its opening and closing for dramatic effect. At least this is what they do during the "prose" events, which are basically readings of short texts (composed from key passages of longer works) with some interpretive acting thrown in, and the "duo interpretation" events, in which a couple, usually a mixed-gender one, blends multiple texts into a story they act together.

I often listen to Public Radio International's Selected Shorts while driving between Austin and Houston. During this captivating program, great actors read short stories on stage. The college speech contest was better in several ways: first, I could see the students in front of me, a few feet away; second, they put a lot more passion and dramatization in their reading that is done in a program like Selected Shorts; and third, this was as good as going to a performance at a playhouse... but free.

The typical way these interpretive readings are done follows a specific routine: the performer (or performers, in the case of the Duo event) read a first paragraph of the story, setting the stage and whetting the viewer's appetite. Then they close their book rather ostentatiously, implying that they are now departing from the text, and give a short introduction to the work and its meaning; they conclude that part by stating the title and author. Then they re-open their book (mostly for effect, to indicate that they are going back to the text) and resume where they left off after the interest-provoking opening.

There are other types of events -- one is about persuasive speaking (convincing the listener of a point), another about talking about a subject with minimal preparation, another about giving an entertaining after-dinner talk.

I took some notes about the six stories that were competing in the Prose finals. Today, I used those notes to research the authors and titles of the works (I found four out of six -- thank you Google) because I hate to mention works of art without attribution. I hope these terse notes will give an idea of the depth and variety of the contestants' sources. A common point is that these are texts that carry a lot of emotional weight, a lot of passion, and this allows the performer to express himself of herself very strongly -- again, contrasting with a "normal" reading.

Nathan: in Brian de Leeuw's novel "In This Way I Was Saved," a boy develops a complicated, controlling, and ultimately insane relationship with another boy, and several years later, in college, kills his friend rather than losing control over him.

Brendan: in Joe Meno's "The Boy Detective Fails," Billy tries to make sense of his sister's suicide, the one case he is not able to solve, but ends up in psychiatric care, unable to cope with the reality.

Kyle/Kile: a man literally gives up his right arm for his girlfriend -- a metaphor about commitment, sacrifice and resentment. Creepy but very effectively performed.

Amanda: in Laura van den Berg's story "Where We Must Be," Jane, a failed actress and mother of Jimmy who will soon die from a lethal disease, takes (and then loses) a job impersonating Bigfoot at a local amusement part, providing a comical counterpoint to a poignant story.

Colin: Richard McCann's essay "The Resurrectionist" explores the complicated feelings someone has toward the donor of the liver he received as a transplant.

Jeremy: after his mother dies, a man sorts the contents of her attic and finds nude photos of her that his father had (unsuccessfully) submitted to Playboy Magazine for their centerfold.

Most of the duo interpretation texts had something to do with exposing prejudices, racial or ethnic. This again gave the students an opportunity to do some great acting around the texts they had chosen. The audience often laughed... and then paused when the next sentences in the text made us realize that perhaps we had laughed at something that should have made us upset, or laughed because of a preconceived idea we had about people from a certain background.

Overall, this was eye-opening... and a good incentive to find out more such events in the future and attend them.

The Planets

Saturday is named after Saturn, the greek Chronos, the god of time. That's the day (two days ago) when I went to see the performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets at the Houston Symphony, which promised a movie montage of high-definition pictures from space telescopes, projected above the orchestra, to illustrate the subject matter.

For a while, I didn't think I was going to make it. After consulting with my newly-moved-to-Houston friends David and Brenda to gauge their interest, I called to get three tickets, expecting that it would be fairly easy as usual, and was told that there were only single obstructed-view tickets left for all three remaining performances. So we gave up on the idea of going together on Sunday, but by Saturday evening I resolved to try my old Boston trick. I dusted off my cardboard sign that reads "Looking to Buy ONE Ticket," the one that got me into multiple performances at the ICA on the waterfront there, and went to Jones Hall.

I should have known it was my lucky day when I managed to parallel-park in a space between two cars that was, I swear (I measured it) 4" (10 cm) longer than my car. Of course, strictly speaking, that's pretty impossible. But not to an ex-Paris driver, and not considering the elasticity of car bumpers and of tires: you can (gently) touch the car behind, push a little, then move forward, touch the car ahead, push a little... and pretty soon you're in. Still, you have to get exactly the right angle, and the planets must have been with me.

The very nice usher at Jones Hall told me, within a minute of my taking position in front of the entrance, that there was no way she could let me stand there with my sign. But she said not to worry, she was sure she could do something for me. And sure enough, ten minutes later, she had secured a ticket that someone turned in because someone in their party couldn't come, and she gave it to me! So not only did I get a seat, but it was free. And I even had time left to munch on the tiny overpriced cheese-and-fruit plate sold by the Jones Hall concessionaire. The seat was at the rightmost end of an orchestra row, and the view was in fact slightly obstructed by the underside of the boxes, but barely -- just a little sliver missing at the top of the projection screen, and an excellent view of the stage.

The concert started with the Scherzo fantastique by Stravinsky, whom I tolerate reasonably well. It was followed by Timbres, espace, mouvement (la nuit étoilée) by Dutilleux, and that was much harder for me. But the Holst suite made it up. It was only the second time I heard the entire suite (classical radio stations usually just play the most famous movement, the fourth one, Jupiter - Bringer of Jollity), the first time also being live. I was wondering whether the projection of the film would add to or detract from the musical experience, and I am satisfied that it was an excellent addition. Duncan Copp's movie, using NASA footage from various interplanetary probes as well as CGI, is visually stunning. That is also got the Symphony to give several sold-out performances is very comforting, given how difficult it usually is for classical orchestras to balance their budget and to attract a younger-than-70 audience.

And my car didn't have any more scratches when I retrieved it than it had before — it just took another dozen or so back-and-forth maneuvers to extract it from its parking spot.

Addiction: Conflict Between Brain Circuits

This was the title of a lecture given today at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston. I heard about on National Public Radio a few weeks ago, made a note to visit the Web site, registered and drove down from Houston to Galveston today to attend. In case you don't know why I have such a keen interest in the science of addiction, my November 10, 2009 post will explain it.

Dr. Nora Volkow, the speaker is the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Quoting from her biography:

"Dr. Volkow's work has been instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain. As a research psychiatrist and scientist, Dr. Volkow pioneered the use of brain imaging to investigate the toxic effects of drugs and their addictive properties. Her studies have documented changes in the dopamine system affecting the actions of frontal brain regions involved with motivation, drive, and pleasure and the decline of brain dopamine function with age."

Of course, I couldn't resist taking some notes. This is just a sampling of all the interesting things that were said.

• After someone takes either food or amphetamines, you can see the same increase if dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. But drugs don't have the same satiating effects as food.
• Experiments can be conducted on humans using methylphenidate, which mimics the effects of cocaine. It also blocks the re-uptake of dopamine, causing the receptors to be flooded with the stuff. The "high" effect can be reported by the subject, and happens only if the substance is administered intravenously; if it is taken orally, it gets into the brain much more slowly and you see no effect at all, even allowing for a much longer period of time. So the dynamic aspect of drug administration is key.
• Different drugs have different clearance rates, and the "high" seems related to the rate of change of dopamine concentration, not to the absolute level. So if the level of dopamine goes up rapidly, then decays very slowly, the "high" does not persist, but starts dropping quickly as soon as the dopamine level has reached its maximum.
• Her imaging techniques allow her to study the effects of drugs on separate brain functions located in different places: the executive function (decision-making); inhibitory control (which allows a non-alcoholic to decide not to have one more drink, but is evidently damaged in the alcoholic); motivation and drive; memory and learning.
• Tests on animals who have been trained to push a lever to self-administer a drug have shown that causing the overexpression of dopamine D2 receptors causes the rats to lower their usage. As the substance injected to cause this overexpression wears off, over a period of 10 days or so, drug self-administration progressively returns to its previous level.
  
• Changes in dopamine receptors in the striatum correlate with changes in glucose metabolism in specific other parts of the brain, such as the orbital frontal cortex, which are also the effects observed in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Another similarity between OCD and addiction is that when the reinforcement ceases (e.g., a lab rat is no longer given food when he is pressing the lever he had associated with this reward, or an addict no longer gets pleasure from his drug), he/it is still compulsively practicing the behavior.
• In the non-addicted brain, the ability to control actions is decreased by disruptions, such as anger, that affect the prefrontal cortex. That's why, when you just heard that your flight is canceled, you're more likely to go ahead and have that chocolate chip cookie that you had resisted earlier.