Linked List: December 15, 2013

Sunday, 15 December 2013

‘One Star’ 

On this week’s episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, I’m joined by special guest Daniel Jalkut. Topics include podcast transcripts, and the “Rate This App” controversy.

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The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder 

Eye-opening investigative report by Alan Schwarz for the NYT:

After more than 50 years leading the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Keith Conners could be celebrating.

Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond.

But Dr. Conners did not feel triumphant this fall as he addressed a group of fellow A.D.H.D. specialists in Washington. He noted that recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. He questioned the rising rates of diagnosis and called them “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.”

“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

Apple Can’t Ban ‘Rate This App’ Dialogs 

Marco Arment:

A rule banning “Rate This App” dialogs would have the same problem: since the dialog is unlikely to appear during app review (and could be easily coded to guarantee that it wouldn’t), they’ll almost never reject anything for it. Once an app is in the wild, there’s no good way for Apple to be reliably notified of violations, and even if they added one, the line between permissible and prohibited would be vague and easy to skirt.

We could all rate these apps lower as a form of protest, but it’s unlikely to have a meaningful impact. The App Store is a big place.

I agree that Apple, practically speaking, couldn’t ban this practice. But I’m not so sure that a groundswell campaign to rate these apps poorly wouldn’t work. The App Store is indeed a big place, but there aren’t that many reviews for most apps, even popular ones.