Domain: karger.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to karger.com.
Comments · 7
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Actual paper is behind paywall
But you can read the abstract for free.
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Re:Simple... if "Y" chromosome found = male
Female-phenotype XXY seems to be very rare but has been reported.
Cases of individuals who had an XXY karyotype and a female phenotype have been reported [37].
[37] Schmid M, Guttenbach M, Endres H, Terruhn V. A 47,XXY female with unusual genitalia. Hum Genet 1992;90:346â"9.
source47,XXY female with testicular feminization and positive SRY: a case report.
and even An SRY-negative 47,XXY mother and daughter
Further discussion, rather inconclusive: bodieslikeours forum - anecdotal references to an XXY female in New Zealand, and of Klinefelter himself saying that 1 of his original 9 patients was female
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Re:Deception is not always evil.
So yeah, the idea of "deception" is a human construct, as is the idea of "evil." And one could argue (as a previous poster did) that successive generations developing behaviors which are in their own self interest (so they get more food) but may (as a byproduct) be deleterious to others (since they get less food) is not a surprise. But extrapolate this to humans, and you get the kinds of behaviors that we call "deceptive" and, since we have ideas about the virtue of altruism, we call such behaviors "evil." This is experiment is definitely interesting in terms of group dynamics and behavior, and also because the novelty of the robots' solution to their problem is interesting-- two very different lines of thought. This kind of "deception" is one obvious and common solution to the problem of limited supply and competitive demand.
Deception is most interesting, I think, when you pair it with understanding of the "other" --that one is not merely making a strategy to get more food, but that in the process one is taking that food from others. So when humans and our closest relatives practice deceptive behaviors (which are surely-- and here demonstrably-- evolutionarily beneficial) it's complicated by our... moral sense? Altruistic tendencies? That's fascinating! When robots start to develop guilt complexes for their deceptive behaviors and guiltily hand over their food to others when caught in the act, I'll be impressed.
We are not using the term "deception" here in it's standard (moral) sense, which would indicate knowledge that another individual is being "fooled."
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Guesswork at its best...
I am a junior doctor and an old time contributor to Slashdot. I want to comment on this press release but I'm not interested in any trouble my guesswork may cause me.
Steve Jobs had pancreaticoduodenectomy (Whipple's Procedure) for pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer a while ago. His press release is very cryptic and makes little sense because he's using the layman's definition of terms he's using instead of precise medical terms. I'll do my best to decipher it.
First of all, Jobs is losing weight. Is this malnutrition or cancer-related cachexia? The former simply has to do with the body not receiving enough nurishment. The latter is an inflammatory condition related to abnormalities in inflammatory cytokines. Both cause similar outward effects but the underlying processes are very different. If we are to believe the press release then Jobs doesn't have a resurgence of his cancer. A Bloomberg article today commented that "Neuroendocrine islet cell tumors can cause overproduction of either one, or other powerful hormones such as somatostatin or gastrin, which are involved in digestion." While this is true, we are assuming Jobs had his tumor completely reseted so this isn't very likely. Therefore he probably has some form of malnutrition (more on this later).
"Nutrition Management of the Cancer Patient" By Abby S. Bloch states on page 89:
"Surgical resection as a treatment modality for pancreatic cancer creates several nutrition challenges: malabsorption caused by inadequate or absent exocrine pancreatic secretions or obstruction of the common bile duct (or both), diabetes mellitus resulting from resection of endocrine pancreatic cells, and protein-calorie malnutrition, which develops secondary to malabsorption."
If we are to believe the press release, then chances are it could be any of these issues. The only issues that fall under a "nutritional problem [that] is relatively simple and straightforward" are or absent exocrine pancreatic secretions, diabetes mellitus, and protein-calorie malnutrition secondary to malabsorption.
There are several articles which discuss these issues both in chronic pancreatitis and in patients status-post pancreatic resection and intestinal bypass. The one curious omission in the press release is the onset of symptoms. Mr. Jobs sounds like he was surprised by his weight loss and his doctors were confused. In Pancreatic Exocrine Insufficiency patients often have statorrhea which is a white-colored and foul smelling fat rich stool. Did he not notice this or was this detail to vulgar for Apple's shareholders and fanbase? It's wholly possible that he didn't have statorrhea which could have caused his doctors to run more tests to check for the worst-case scenarios such as his cancer reappearing. I think its fairly safe to take Mr. Jobs at his word. If his symptoms don't change by Spring then we can revisit this topic.
Anyway, "Pancreatic Cancer" By Douglas Brian Evans, Peter W. T. Pisters, James L. Abbruzzese is a wonderful resource that spends a great deal of time discussing Whipple's Procedure and I would suggest reading Part III from pages 123 to 232. Another great research paper is: "Management of complications following pancreaticoduodenectomy" by CJ Yeo.
Lastly I'd like to say this is all guesswork without having Mr. Jobs' and his test results in front of me so I welcome other doctors, experts, and researchers to comment on this press release. We can all benefit by collaboration. Remember, chaos is the score upon which reality is written but collaboration can swiftly bring some order.
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Re:660K years vs. 10K?
A sperm whale has a brain mass of 7.8kg [wikipedia.org], about 6 times ours. They are, however, between 25 and 55 Mg, which is far greater than six times our own mass. Hence, we are smarter.
"Hence" we are smarter?
The word "hence" implies a causal link, but I don't see any. You say,
With a larger body, you need a bigger brain to pull off the same feats
but this is awfully weak as explanations go (I'm sure you agree). So I'm still left thinking that E.Q. is a circular definition: We believe that we are smartest, so we looked for a plausible function that "happens" to make us win.
The problem is, there's actually evidence that E.Q. is not a good predictor of intelligence. At least among primates, Overall Brain Size, and Not Encephalization Quotient, Best Predicts Cognitive Ability across Non-Human Primates.
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Re:Statistical confidence
We don't have a particularly good estimate of the rate of remission caused by the new therapy.
Exactly, zero rate of remission is within the margin of error. By that definition the null hypothesis can't be rejected. Get it? No matter how small the spontaneous remission rates are, they will be higher than zero. I'm not sure how to explain it to you further - I've tried both with words and equations.
No. But (1) I think you need the some skill in the former before you can embark on the latter and (2) in a suitable limit, statistics needs to match mathematical logic, and a good test of your statistical methodology is to examine it's behaviour in the limit and compare it with mathematical logic.
Um, no, they operate at completely different levels. To give you an example, let's suppose that our hypothesis is that there are no internet users that have "Reinstate Pluto!" in their signature when posting in forums. Using a logical proof it's simple - we must reject the hypothesis. You have it in your sig so clearly the hypothesis is false. The statistical conclusion will be the exact opposite. After we sample 1000 random forum posts across the Internet, we will be able to confirm the hypothesis with 99.9% confidence or more.Good enough to publish
You'd be surprised how ignorant medical researchers are of statistics and what complete rubbish gets peer-reviewed and published. I work for a company that does data mining and we've done consulting on way too many medical research projects for me to have any illusion about how the scientific method is applied in that field. I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain to doctors that no, you can't use two samples for building your model and a third for validation. I do sympathize though, there's no tougher field of data collection both because the human factor and the fact that truly random samples are very difficult to obtain.But we have excellent evidence that it is indeed causing remissions.
No we don't. The actual spontaneous remission rate for this type of cancer (malignant melanoma) is 1/400. I looked it up here. Now if we do a little thought experiment. Suppose we took 10 groups of people with 40 people in each. We give each group a different type of soft drink. After a while we notice that of those drinking fanta, we had one survivor. We are terribly pleased with ourselves as obviously we have found that fanta cures cancer in 1/40 people compared to the 1/400 which is the standard going rate. Or have we?No, probably fanta didn't cure the cancer. Most likely it was just a case of being within the error margin of the sampling. Or would you say in this case that we have "excellent evidence that it is indeed causing remissions"? The overall probability for the population is one thing, but the confidence of a measurement of that probability on your sample is a different thing. The larger the sample size the closer you will get to the real value. Calculating the error margin gives you how close you are to the probability for the population. In this example your estimate may have nothing to do with the real probability, as zero probability is within the margin of error. So in fact, since the spontaneous rate is > 0, for all that you know your medicine may actually decrease the chance of survival for your patients.
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Maybe eyes HAVEN'T evolved multiple timesThere's a good Science News article about eye evolution that indicates that there have been many independent developments of the physical hardware supporting an initial light-sensitive patch, but the patch itself might be fairly unique. (Including some groovy stuff about a gene that stimulates spontaneous eye generation all over insect bodies: at the tips of their feet and such.)
This guy agrees, claiming that the light-sensitive patch genes are pretty conserved.
However, this crowd seems to think that although opsins are remarkably well-conserved across different phyla, the controlling genes that the abovementioned people were obsessed by control many other gene families, besides eye development, so it's still possible that there are different complete eye evolution families.
They talk a bit about fish and squid eyes: I didn't know that squids and octopi have inverted (compared to mammals) retinal structures. They must be *very* good at low-light conditions.