Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Smart drugs, in defense of young people get a software that unmasks – The Republic

DRUGS Carbs dish that circumvent the law: they can be easily found in specialty stores, or online; and sometimes even extracted at home by everyday products. First, we have to do with drugs that serve to enhance the activity of the brain. Many are stimulators of serotonin and dopamine which regulate functions such as mood, sleep patterns and memory and can improve concentration and learning ability. Are substances similar to those used by doctors, but changed in parts to be upgraded. And the result is that no one knows what the side effects are not always known as these substances are already available in the online market. In Italy the use of at least 40,000 students and do not know how many other people. And their effects they see, day after day, the doctors in the Emergency Room, located in front of children in serious conditions: abused something that, though, the white coats do not know; and then they do not know cure.

Hidden in the bubble bath. Not only that, most of the active ingredients of smart drugs is in everyday objects. And online is easy to find out how to acquire them, perhaps with the DIY: extracting, for example, the bubble bath Salvia divinorum, a powerful hallucinogen. The network is the preferred means of communication, and network focuses on the study of the CNR of Pisa in collaboration with King’s College London. It is the Cassandra Project: since February this year, and for two years, researchers have to develop a software that monitors the new psychoactive substances on the web allowing predictions on their consumption. As? First analyzing the conversations of the past 10 years to establish a scheme linking the discussion, the arrival and spread of the new substance. “We have seen that in 2010 the forum there was a spike in interest in mephedrone, a synthetic drug that can alter the perception of reality,” says Maurizio Tesconi, researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the National Research Council in Pisa . And in the same year the substance has conquered online commerce, only to be banned by the European Union a few months later.

Thousands of online conversations. The posts are collected 5,000,000 and users who took part in conversations 550,000. Because the forum is traded everything from recipes to extract substances to advice on how to handle the ‘hit’, to the description of the side effects. The only prohibition is direct sale and purchase of illegal substances. “In these forums will seek the frontiers of new drugs, experiencing them in person and then share the experience on the internet,” says Tesconi. And in fact the home page of one of the blogs we find a section dedicated to the creation of drugs with conversations about chemistry, extraction and cultivation of psychoactive plants.

A software ‘hunting’ of drugs . The team was born in Pisa in 2012 with Social Trends, a project that analyzed the pages of famous people to understand who was most influential on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. It was one of the first software able to tell if it was the most popular Vasco Rossi and Alessandro Del Piero. “When I read of Social Trends I immediately thought of an application in the field of health – remember Paolo De Luca, a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, King’s College who has decades of experience in research on addictions – We were already trying to extract useful information from the forums, but we did it manually, reading conversation to conversation. “

Data. The Italian computer can instead download large amounts of data and to classify them by keywords, respecting the meaning that the individual terms have in the context. At this stage we are looking for the names of 101 drugs recommended by psychologists at King’s College, but in the coming months, the challenge is to find new drugs for the first, to provide timely information to the doctors in the emergency room.

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