Domain: nih.gov
Stories and comments across the archive that link to nih.gov.
Comments · 5,290
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Re:Affirmative Action is not the same as sexism
Did you read you link?
It doesn't say what you think it says. Not surprising. It's deliberately unclear, like most social science.
Men in traditional woman jobs were rated second highest of categories. The highest rated category was (wait for it) women in traditional woman jobs.
Basically it says the opposite of what you claim it says.
Sorry, I thought the link was talking about the professional effect rather than perception.
This paper suggest an actual professional advantage for male nurses though the abstract doesn't mention in comparison to what. There's various other sites talking about the effect but that's the only peer reviewed study I saw.
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Re:Why stop there?
In theory, and under very specific conditions... yes. Under VERY dim light, rods can act kind of like hypothetical "blue-green" cones. If you found the right pigments (no combination of common "process-color" red/cyan/magenta/black pigments will work for this), you could theoretically mix two paint shades that looked absolutely identical to most people in bright light, but were distinctly different when viewed in dim light using only peripheral vision.
There are some men (I don't think women have ever been identified) who appear to be "protanomalous, without red dimming". It turns out, they're REALLY deuteranopes with only blue & red cones, but for some reason ALSO have rod cells that don't shut down in brighter light & act kind of like slightly-odd green cones.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
This is also why some argue that medical marijuana can treat color blindness. Some cannabinoids are believed to induce a state of higher tolerance for brighter light in rods... effectively inducing a state similar to the deuteranopes-who-appear-protanomalous.
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Re:These licensing deals
This is publicly funded research
That is actually a pretty big assumption you are making, there. The Neitzes do each have one R01 (research) grant through the NIH (you can look them up here if you'd like) however research on this scale can't be done with only that large of a budget. While each of those grants are six-figure totals, those are multi-year grants and they pay salaries (faculty, postdocs, grad students, and technicians), they buy supplies, and they pay the university to keep the lights on. There was certainly additional funding coming from other sources to get through to human testing.
So indeed, some of it was publicly funded, but we don't know from any of the information in front of us how much of it was publicly funded. Just because they work at a public university doesn't mean they didn't have some non-public money coming in to support their research; this is quite common today with the way research budgets work when dealing with the federal government.At a minimum, these deals should have a clause requiring the amount of public money spent on such research should get paid back from these corporate proceeds before the schools and companies start collecting.
That isn't a terrible request, provided you are willing to request that happen only if the corporate proceeds actually pan out. There are other faculty at public universities who try to start their own companies and the companies end up going broke without ever turning a profit.
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Higher Free IGF-1 Levels
Why the hell can't it be related to higher free IGF-1 levels?
There are studies indicating that obese people have higher free IGF-1 levels.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
There are also studies saying that high levels of IGF-1 are linked to a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and subclinical brain atrophy:
http://www.neurologyreviews.co... -
Re:Only correlation has been established.
Actually, studies tend to show that being slightly over weight reduces all-cause mortality compared to "normal".
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Your all-cause mortality rate for overweight, and grade-1 obese are roughly 0.95 times that for "normal" weight. However, being grade-2 obese or more is associated with a sudden, very rapid increase in mortality rate.
Basically, being slightly overweight isn't bad, and may even be pretty good. Being more-than-slightly overweight is really really really bad though.
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Re:Still waiting on MEMS to set the world afire
An embedded microchannel in a MEMS plate resonator for ultrasensitive mass sensing in liquid. This is one published paper on (proteomics) mass spec using MEMS.
Real-time particle mass spectrometry based on resonant micro strings. This is another one.
Single-protein nanomechanical mass spectrometry in real time. Some times they call it "nanomechanical" instead, making it NEMS instead of MEMS.
As I said though it seemed like this would turn the world on its head for mass spec; tiny accurate sensors the size of eraser heads. It hasn't happened yet, and I'm not connected to it well enough to know why. -
Re:Still waiting on MEMS to set the world afire
An embedded microchannel in a MEMS plate resonator for ultrasensitive mass sensing in liquid. This is one published paper on (proteomics) mass spec using MEMS.
Real-time particle mass spectrometry based on resonant micro strings. This is another one.
Single-protein nanomechanical mass spectrometry in real time. Some times they call it "nanomechanical" instead, making it NEMS instead of MEMS.
As I said though it seemed like this would turn the world on its head for mass spec; tiny accurate sensors the size of eraser heads. It hasn't happened yet, and I'm not connected to it well enough to know why. -
Re:Still waiting on MEMS to set the world afire
An embedded microchannel in a MEMS plate resonator for ultrasensitive mass sensing in liquid. This is one published paper on (proteomics) mass spec using MEMS.
Real-time particle mass spectrometry based on resonant micro strings. This is another one.
Single-protein nanomechanical mass spectrometry in real time. Some times they call it "nanomechanical" instead, making it NEMS instead of MEMS.
As I said though it seemed like this would turn the world on its head for mass spec; tiny accurate sensors the size of eraser heads. It hasn't happened yet, and I'm not connected to it well enough to know why. -
Re:Correlation is not Causation
The Paleo diet today isn't good for your health.
Unsurprisingly, here is a study in Nature that points out copying Paleolithic diets would not be very useful anyway (not in the least because we've evolved since then, through the Neolithic era).
The paleo diet is yet another fully trademarked fad diet.The Paleo diet was originally known to most Australians as the CSIRO diet and it's meant for weight loss, not as a regular diet. Its the same with Paleo which has the same high protein, low carbohydrate principles. The CSIRO diet is coupled with exercise and other elements as a 12 week program. Like Paleo, it's designed to induce Ketosis which isn't a healthy state to be in for years, but is just fine for a few months whilst you drop a few kilos.
Unlike fad diets, high protein, low carb diets are proven to reduce weight when combined with moderate exercise. -
Re:Correlation is not Causation
This article talks about why "what we were doing 100,000 years ago" is not particularly useful for understanding a healthy modern diet. (In brief: we as humans are omnivores, especially suited to eating many different things, and in any case humans evolve to match their diet....on a much smaller scale than 100,000 years, as the paper points out).
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Re:Correlation is not Causation
I don't know why you think so.
Here's an interview on PBS: "I went to visit indigenous people and hunter-gatherers...they don’t get that much meat because hunting is hard work."
Look at the chart half-way down, of some of the hunter/gatherer tribes that still exist. There is huge variety in one they eat....some are mostly meat, some are mostly plants.
The Paleo diet today isn't good for your health.
Unsurprisingly, here is a study in Nature that points out copying Paleolithic diets would not be very useful anyway (not in the least because we've evolved since then, through the Neolithic era).
The paleo diet is yet another fully trademarked fad diet. -
Bias is part of the human condition
Technology is neutral and amoral.
That opening sentence clearly reveals the bias of the author. Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical applications. By definition, those are not neutral or amoral because that application is driven by whoever wants to create the practical application. Further, multiple studies have revealed how biased scientific research can be since humans by nature have biases that we often don't even realize we believe until we're confronted with overwhelming evidence. While this book sounds like it's worth reading, please don't fall into the trap of believing technology is somehow inherently neutral. It's a directed process. The beliefs and morals of those doing the directing invariably influence the technology.
Some links to research into bias in science:
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Re:eliminate extra sugar
No, I'm not a shill; I just recognize bullshit when I see it. HFCS is NOT that different from "natural" sugar. The reason food producers use it is because it's cheaper than cane or beet sugar, and the corn producers do have a vested interest in pushing their product. Politics are involved, but the chemistry is not in question.
The thing is, people are eating more and exercising less, and suddenly they find themselves overweight so they point to the label and say, "HFCS - my God, it's in everything! That's why I'm fat!" This despite study after study showing that it's basically the same as other sugars and digested similarly. Consuming too much of any sugar will affect your health.
"The bottom line is that there is no valid reason for HFCS to be any different than sucrose in the way that it affects your body." http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=19
"Because the composition of HFCS and sucrose is so similar, particularly on absorption by the body, it appears unlikely that HFCS contributes more to obesity or other conditions than sucrose does" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20516261
"The hypothesis that HFCS is a unique cause of obesity is not supportable in the United States or elsewhere" http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/88/6/1716S.full
"Sucrose and HFCS do not have substantially different short-term endocrine/metabolic effects." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18469239I really don't know why you think it's strange that I can browse comments and see the newest ones first. It's called sorting.
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Re:eliminate extra sugar
No, I'm not a shill; I just recognize bullshit when I see it. HFCS is NOT that different from "natural" sugar. The reason food producers use it is because it's cheaper than cane or beet sugar, and the corn producers do have a vested interest in pushing their product. Politics are involved, but the chemistry is not in question.
The thing is, people are eating more and exercising less, and suddenly they find themselves overweight so they point to the label and say, "HFCS - my God, it's in everything! That's why I'm fat!" This despite study after study showing that it's basically the same as other sugars and digested similarly. Consuming too much of any sugar will affect your health.
"The bottom line is that there is no valid reason for HFCS to be any different than sucrose in the way that it affects your body." http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=19
"Because the composition of HFCS and sucrose is so similar, particularly on absorption by the body, it appears unlikely that HFCS contributes more to obesity or other conditions than sucrose does" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20516261
"The hypothesis that HFCS is a unique cause of obesity is not supportable in the United States or elsewhere" http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/88/6/1716S.full
"Sucrose and HFCS do not have substantially different short-term endocrine/metabolic effects." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18469239I really don't know why you think it's strange that I can browse comments and see the newest ones first. It's called sorting.
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Re:it could have been an accident
So what you're saying is that...it's possible?
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Yes, right from inception -"beer of revenge"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://www.themalthouse.co.nz/blog/125-the-beer-of-revenge
Louis Pasteur's beer is the basis of Fosters. -
Re:Amazing post
Here's an NIH funded study that touches on the topic: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
But there is a metric TON of bad diet and fitness research out there. It's mind boggling how many studies use slow walking as "exercise" and think "weight training" involves nothing more than a leg lift machine. It also seems like the vast majority work with "sedentary" subjects and follow them for a few weeks before pronouncing the study "done". Here's a critique of one such study that compared cardio to strength training: http://www.builtlean.com/2013/...
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Re:Also apparently causes bee colony collapse...
I guess you didn't read the summary of the first study;
There were no significant effects from glyphosate observed in brood survival, development, and mean pupal weight. Additionally, there were no biologically significant levels of adult mortality observed in any glyphosate treatment group.
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Known since 2002
Glyphosate causes cell cycle dysfunction which can result in cancer: Marc et al 2002, 2003. Of course cancer is not the only health risk: The Lethal Dangers of “Roundup” Made by Monsanto
Glyphosate was used by the US as a modern Agent Orange in Colombia: wikipedia -
Re:Decoy
How about 30GB of genetic data?
Having a real password of "I forgot" or "I don't know my password" could make for a quite interesting exchange.
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Re:Free market will sort it out
Thanks for your expert opinion... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
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Re:Curated Collection
Hmmm. Sounds like Google is moving toward the concept of a Curated Collection.
Wonder where they would have gotten THAT Idea...?If you want to be that nonspecific, I will point out that was making submissions to a Curated Collection a decade before Apple launched their App store for any platform. So perhaps google took the idea from the National Institutes of Health?
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Re:Maybe in a different country
Yes one can make such an argument. It would however not be based on reality and would be easily disproved by research data and statistics.
Most people that are suicidal don't want to suffer a painful death. Most people have their darkest moments while at home.
There are many, many ways to kill yourself that don't involve a painful death, unlike guns, which may take out part of your brain but leave you alive and permanently handicapped.
Got access to prescription meds for yourself or your family? A lot of them are lethal when overdosed. Insulin, for example. You can inject 600 units of NPH (slow-acting insulin) followed by 300-600 units of Novolin-Toronto (regular-actng insulin) and even if your body survives, you'll be brain-dead.
Interestingly, many insulin suicides are by paramedics and non-diabetics.
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Re:i'th Post
What would make you think that?
Well, for example:
Kelsey helped shape and enforce amendments to FDA drug regulation laws to institutionalize protection of the patient in drug investigations.
What, legislative involvement? Sounds like political activism to me! Not something your ordinary scientist or civil servant does in his free time. But I'm not sure that "political activism" is a better label than "a concerned scientist's conscience", just like in Hansen's case.
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Re:No time zones, no DST, centons
So yeah, you do have a pretty good idea, based on the time, if people are likely to be working, awake or sleeping at certain times of the day.
Your reference only looked at 3rd shift.
When you look at all workers in the US, your 97% figure turns into 52.6% when you factor in all of the various work arrangements outside of the normal working arrangements.
So, only slightly better than flipping a coin. Try again.
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Re:Lots of weird crap coming out of Congress latel
I am prepared to engage with you on this issue rationally. But you should be warned now... I am extremely rational. Doubletalk, sophistry, and other fallacious nonsense will simply get vivisected and pinned to an examination table while I take it apart bit by bit putting each little piece in its own little formaldehyde jar with its own little label.
That's fine. You're exactly the audience this piece of legislation targets. I mean, really, who would make a rational argument against using good, reproducible, published science to support their policy.
This legislation is social engineering that depends on the distinction between theory and practice. In theory, it's great to use data to support your policies, to have good science backing your regulations, and to know the exact effects you're trying to block or induce. In practice, those data do not exist. There's 150+ chemicals at my job site, and the MSDSs for half of them report "Data not available." This legislation is intended to delay for as long as possible any regulatory action.
Example, pentachlorophenol, one of the most common preservatives for telephone poles and RR ties over the past 30 years, still lacks any human carcinogenicty studies. It looks like penta is metabolized in vivo to a much more carcinogenic compound, and I imagine that another 10 years or so will produce pretty convincing data. Meanwhile, the EPA has been allowed to regulate penta as a probable carcinogen since the early 80s. This includes banning the sale to private individuals (it used to be a popular fungicide for people to spray around their basements). Penta is one of the better studied molecules because of its popularity and explicitly toxic function, and after 60 years, one can still argue that there is no reproducible scientific data demonstrating its role in cancer.
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Re:Easy life
You'd have to browse Pubmed with blinders on to miss all the studies of how weight training leads to injuries. Just picking one author who writes about them, here's 1 2 3 4 studies on it. I only do body weight exercises now, and I count myself lucky that I only have one mild uncorrectable shoulder injury from my lifting days.
Makes me wonder if the studies controlled for crossfit idiocy or not.
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Re:Easy life
You'd have to browse Pubmed with blinders on to miss all the studies of how weight training leads to injuries. Just picking one author who writes about them, here's 1 2 3 4 studies on it. I only do body weight exercises now, and I count myself lucky that I only have one mild uncorrectable shoulder injury from my lifting days.
Makes me wonder if the studies controlled for crossfit idiocy or not.
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Re:Easy life
You'd have to browse Pubmed with blinders on to miss all the studies of how weight training leads to injuries. Just picking one author who writes about them, here's 1 2 3 4 studies on it. I only do body weight exercises now, and I count myself lucky that I only have one mild uncorrectable shoulder injury from my lifting days.
Makes me wonder if the studies controlled for crossfit idiocy or not.
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Re:Easy life
You'd have to browse Pubmed with blinders on to miss all the studies of how weight training leads to injuries. Just picking one author who writes about them, here's 1 2 3 4 studies on it. I only do body weight exercises now, and I count myself lucky that I only have one mild uncorrectable shoulder injury from my lifting days.
Makes me wonder if the studies controlled for crossfit idiocy or not.
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Re:Easy life
You'd have to browse Pubmed with blinders on to miss all the studies of how weight training leads to injuries. Just picking one author who writes about them, here's 1 2 3 4 studies on it. I only do body weight exercises now, and I count myself lucky that I only have one mild uncorrectable shoulder injury from my lifting days.
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Re:Easy life
You'd have to browse Pubmed with blinders on to miss all the studies of how weight training leads to injuries. Just picking one author who writes about them, here's 1 2 3 4 studies on it. I only do body weight exercises now, and I count myself lucky that I only have one mild uncorrectable shoulder injury from my lifting days.
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Re:Easy life
You'd have to browse Pubmed with blinders on to miss all the studies of how weight training leads to injuries. Just picking one author who writes about them, here's 1 2 3 4 studies on it. I only do body weight exercises now, and I count myself lucky that I only have one mild uncorrectable shoulder injury from my lifting days.
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Re:Easy life
You'd have to browse Pubmed with blinders on to miss all the studies of how weight training leads to injuries. Just picking one author who writes about them, here's 1 2 3 4 studies on it. I only do body weight exercises now, and I count myself lucky that I only have one mild uncorrectable shoulder injury from my lifting days.
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Cutting rates 90% is significant
There was a study done comparing Israeli Jews to European and North American Jews, with the premise being that parents in North America and Europe have been directed to withhold peanuts from babies/toddlers, while this practice is not in place in Israel. You have a genetically similar pool of Jews that migrated to the 3 different regions in the last 100 years. Jewish children in Israel have an allergic rate 10% that of Jewish children in Europe and NA. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
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Re:I got a butt chewing for giving my daughter hon
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... "Honey was also spiked with Cl. botulinum at up to 5000 spores per 50 g honey, which is the upper limit of natural contamination. The sterilizing dose in this case was 18 kGy."
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Re:Alcohol is better for you than water
Woman drinks 30 - 40 glasses of water and dies. * http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
You're 'supposed' to drink 8 glasses a day. A 5x increase of water intake can lead to death.
Women are 'supposed' to limit themselves to 2 standard drinks per day. Drinking 10 standard drinks does not result in death.
Apples to oranges, or a false equivalency. Water is a more-or-less pure substance (i.e., 100% water). If you were to drink 100% ethyl alcohol (the kind in alcoholic beverages) you'd be dead WAY before ten 8 oz. glasses full, let alone 30 - 40.
There is little chance at you smoking yourself to death on marijuana in one sitting. There is a very high chance of drinking yourself to death in one night of binge drinking. *That* is the point of the article and the research. What is the likelihood of a lethal dose if abused, the margin of exposure approach. But, yes, water might have also been in the study for educational purposes if not for sheer shock factor. You could also have put table salt in there, too. Plenty of other common things can cause death if abused.
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The actual methodsThe abstract link from the summary goes to a page that has the full-text of the paper, however the paper refers to another paper for the actual methods. Digging into that paper (which is helpfully available full-text from anywhere - or at least from my home which certainly has no journal subscriptions) gives us:
The assessment of toxicological endpoints and BMD for the selected known and suspected human carcinogens was generally based on literature data, as own doseâ"response modeling would have gone beyond the scope of our study. Suitable risk assessment studies including endpoints and doseâ"response modeling results were typically identified in monographs of national and international risk assessments bodies such as WHO IPCS, JECFA, US EPA and EFSA. For substances without available monographs or with missing data on doseâ"response modeling results, the scientific literature in general was searched for such data. Searches were carried out in September 2011 in the following databases: PubMed (US National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD), Web of Science (Thomson Reuters, Philadelphia, PA), Scopus (Elsevier B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and Google Scholar (Google, Mountain View, CA).
The BMD/MOE approach was used for risk assessment.13, 14 In short, the BMD is the dose of a substance that produces a predetermined change in response rate (benchmark response) of an adverse effect compared to background based on doseâ"response modeling.14 The benchmark response is generally set near the lower limit of responses that can be measured (typically in the range of 1â"10%). The result of BMD-response modeling can then be used in combination with exposure data to calculate a MOE for quantitative risk assessment. The MOE is defined as the ratio between the lower one-sided confidence limit of the BMD (BMDL) and estimated human intake of the same compound. It can be used to compare the health risk of different compounds and in turn prioritize risk management actions. By definition, the lower the MOE, the larger the risk for humans; generally, a value under 10,000 used to define public health risks.15So really, this is about the overall health risks of a substance. Certainly important but that is far from being an endorsement of any of the substances for routine use.
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Alcohol is better for you than water
Woman drinks 30 - 40 glasses of water and dies. * http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
You're 'supposed' to drink 8 glasses a day. A 5x increase of water intake can lead to death.
Women are 'supposed' to limit themselves to 2 standard drinks per day. Drinking 10 standard drinks does not result in death.
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Re:the samples are resistant to anti-malarial arte
"In malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, for example, depletes its host of Vitamin A, possibly resulting in blindness in some cases. However, 200,000 International Units of Vitamin A, given to children every three months can reduce significantly their susceptibility to malaria. This would seem to be a minimum child dosage for the treatment of the disease."
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Re: the samples are resistant to anti-malarial art
If there's one thing a farmer wants to do it is waste money on useless shots.
You're making no sense at all. Farmers give antibiotics because they're proven to bulk up their animals. Meanwhile, we're the ones that get the incurable diseases. Fortunately, antibiotics make e coli O157 produce more shigatoxin so it doesn't really matter how resistant it gets.
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Re:Pinky and the brain
I'm afraid that there isn't anything funny about NIMH...
AFAIK, the "inspiration" for the secrets of NIMH was sadly this experiment...
Not much funny about that...Although it does illustrate that Robert Frost's lamenting of the mending wall is bit idealistic, and perhaps there is a good reason to remember that sometimes, good fences do make good neighbors...
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Quackery at Federal level.
If you look closer at the conclusions made from the study, essentially it's the same thing as having someone swallow a teaspoon of wine so it registers in their blood, and then saying "Drivers with alcohol in their blood are perfectly safe to drive". While they flaunt dosage dependence from alcohol, it is conveniently omitted from marijuana. Disappointing to see a supposed intellectual community like Slashdot post this without examination. There IS such a thing as being "too stoned to drive". It is a common observation and also rational to assume that increasing the dose of the drug will create increased impairment. Here are some studies which came with far less politically correct conclusions. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
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Quackery at Federal level.
If you look closer at the conclusions made from the study, essentially it's the same thing as having someone swallow a teaspoon of wine so it registers in their blood, and then saying "Drivers with alcohol in their blood are perfectly safe to drive". While they flaunt dosage dependence from alcohol, it is conveniently omitted from marijuana. Disappointing to see a supposed intellectual community like Slashdot post this without examination. There IS such a thing as being "too stoned to drive". It is a common observation and also rational to assume that increasing the dose of the drug will create increased impairment. Here are some studies which came with far less politically correct conclusions. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
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Did he read it?
[Theoretical biologist Joshua] Plotkin found the duo's math remarkable in its elegance. But the outcome troubled him. Nature includes numerous examples of cooperative behavior. For example, vampire bats donate some of their blood meal to community members that fail to find prey. Some species of birds and social insects routinely help raise another's brood. Even bacteria can cooperate, sticking to each other so that some may survive poison. If extortion reigns, what drives these and other acts of selflessness?"
I'm not sure Joshua Plotkin read the paper. It does not claim (as I understand it) to represent every scenario, merely a special case of a specific scenario. Explicitly, it requires the organism to have enough intelligence to remember what happened in previous games, so a bacteria without memory is not covered under this model. The strategy requires multiple rounds be played.
Also worth mentioning that 'good for the individual' is not the same as 'good for the species,' and nature selects the latter
I know almost nothing about vampire bats (except don't get bit, you'll need rabies shots!), but if someone understands how it relates to the prisoners' dilemma, I'd be interested in hearing it. -
Direct link to the original paper
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Re:Climate models
Which medical models are you referring to? I know of no computer model designed to predict how long a person will live. Or did you just get confused by the meaning of the word model?
First of all, "computer" is extraneous to modeling. Newton was modeling objects in motion as point masses quite a while back.
Second of all, all science is modeling.
Third of all, what world do you occupy? Or are you posting from the past? Start here: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/c... and work your way down. http://dmm.biologists.org/ http://idmod.org/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... http://www.intellectualventure... and keep going. -
Re:Yes...
I would agree.
It's not just "we want the top 5%," but "we want the top 5% that will take the median salary for the job title in our particular locale"
That brings up an important point, the whole idea of the "Dunning Kruger effect" that individuals with a low skill level not only are unaware that they have a low skill level compared to the average of individuals possessing that skill set, but lack the ability to distinguish the skill levels of that skill set in others as well.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/q...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
This is why in a company wide survey asking workers to rate their skill level relative to the rest of the company, something on the order of 35 to 42% of the company judged themselves to be in the top 5%, which, when when taken mathematically, is patently absurd.
My view on the matter, having a background in music before taking up computer science as a major, is that this reflects a common trapping of ego in terms of the amount of effort one puts forth in practicing their art. I had a college music instructor that hammered into our heads that "A good musician doesn't just practice a piece until he/she gets it right, they practice that piece until they can't get it wrong!" In the case of music it is rather easy for a non skilled "music listener" to tell a good player from a not so good player, to quote the lines from one of my favorite John Wayne movies: El Dorado:
Robert Mitchum played J,P., a drunken Sheriff who in one scene, walks into a saloon with newly deputized John Wayne and a gunman is hiding behind the piano with Joe, the piano player nervously playing hoping the whole situation blows over without him getting killed in the crossfire: (Reminds me so much of being the tech guy in many companies I might add.)
J.P.: Joe, you're playing a lot of sour notes on that piano.
Joe: I know I am.
J.P.: You don't look very happy.
Joe: I'm certainly not.
J.P.: Wouldn't you like to move away from that piano, Joe?
Joe: You're darn right I would.
J.P.: Well, then, move!In the case of computer programming it is easy to fool one's self into thinking they have mastered something when they don't write code every day and constantly spend their time building the mind-set to solve problems with a programming language to where it is second nature to them. Someone mentioned the FizzBuzz game, Just for giggles , I tried it and was able to write a java object to do it in 2 minutes while sitting on the toilet and made it compile on the first try. If you have to spend a night figuring that out and getting it to compile and work right.. you have a bit more practice work to do before you are ready to play a perfect "Old Susanna" on the piano while a gunman is hiding behind the piano waiting to ambush John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, whilst not making any mistakes as it were..
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Re:anti-science???
Seriously? More kids probably die in car crashes on the way to their checkup than die from anaphylaxic reactions from vaccine ingredients. There is a rate of 1/450,000 allergic reactions to vaccines, and of those potentially life-threatening evens are extremely rare. If there's a previously known allergy to an ingredient, then they just don't get that particular vaccine and have to rely on herd immunity (which is why everyone else who can is supposed to get their vaccines) or get a different version of that vaccine. Not rocket science here.
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Re:Backpedalled?
Febrile seizures are not high-risk are not a big deal. The first time I saw one, I grabbed my neighbor and her kid and drove them to the hospital. Since it was 25 below zero outside, the child cooled off on the way there (I didn't wait for the engine to warm up, so the inside of the vehicle was COLD), and everything was fine within a couple of minutes. This is after immersion in a cool bath didn't work (I suspect their idea of a cool bath was too close to normal body temp to have any effect).
They can happen to any young child running a fever. Yes, they can happen, no, they're not cause for panic, and especially not a reason to refuse a vaccine that saves a million lives a year.