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http://www.las.illinois.edu/news/2010/phones/

http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home05/jun05/yantis.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12710835

...

a number of researchers began to suspect that these episodes might have a human-error component (e.g., Schmidt, 1989; Reinhart, 1994), and that a search for an electro-mechanical defect might be misguided. The essential idea was that the driver, intending to put the right foot on the brake, would occasionally place the foot on the accelerator by mistake. Then, when the car moved when a drive gear was engaged, the driver would press harder on the “brake” to stop it, the vehicle would go even faster, resulting in more “brake” application, usw., until the vehicle soon was in a wide-open-throttle condition; the driver (who was invariably panicked) was rendered incapable of diagnosing the situation in the few seconds before a crash occurred.

You suggest putting a software change in there so that the accelerator is ignored when someone is pressing on the brake as well. I don't dispute that. It's another solution, and it's likely a better solution given the history of automobile interfaces. The whole point of the post was to illustrate that if you take a use case of "new users" (or 200 accidents out of 2 million reported.) and build your interface from scratch, you may end up with a result that does not take into account all the existing drivers, who are used to two pedals. Probably the simplest interface would be a centrally mounted joy stick, so that one would no longer have to make left and right hand drive versions of cars, just the central joy stick and you can drive on either side. Pull back to accellerate, push forward to brake (again to make the movement more natural under hard manoeuvring.) Another option is the tank interface, where you drive with an accellerator under each foot for one side of the vehicle, and each hand has a corresponding brake. Another option is a camera in the dash that simply tracks your eye movement, and asks you to look where your want to go, the further ahead you look, the faster you want to go. Don't look at that blonde in the convertible two lanes over!

There are many ways to do it, and once you have drive by wire, as many modern vehi

So, what, you don't think people should require proof before they take action?

Here is a comprehensive review of the scientific literature, done at the University of Arizona (there's another just like it done at University of North Carolina) which compile 77 papers, involving more than 60 randomized studies involving over 1,600 participants.

From the abstract:

Outcomes related to Qigong and Tai Chi practice were identified and evaluated.

RESULTS:
Seventy-seven articles met the inclusion criteria. The nine outcome category groupings that emerged were bone density (n = 4), cardiopulmonary effects (n = 19), physical function (n = 16), falls and related risk factors (n = 23), quality of life (n = 17), self-efficacy (n = 8), patient-reported outcomes (n = 13), psychological symptoms (n = 27), and immune function (n = 6).

CONCLUSIONS:
Research has demonstrated consistent, significant results for a number of health benefits in RCTs, evidencing progress toward recognizing the similarity and equivalence of Qigong and Tai Chi.

When you get to Chicago, look me up and we'll start your lessons.

pubmed.org is your friend : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21254832

We ran into the same problem when downloading the 1000 genome project BAM files from Short Read Archive . Now, we know that the BAM files are indexed so you can easily retrieve all reads overlapping some portion of chromosome 10 etc. But, do the files really need to be that big? Turns out that with simple run-length encoding and other measures we can cut BAM file sizes in half and we can probably use the same indexing scheme. A writeup on that is on our blog.

lmgtfy:

Research:
1: Babiak P, Neumann CS, Hare RD. Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk. Behav
Sci Law. 2010 Mar-Apr;28(2):174-93. PubMed PMID: 20422644.

and the summarizing article from Time.

Obsidian cuts will heal more quickly and with less inflammatory response. Final scar formation may not be appreciably different, but the actual healing occurs more quickly with obsidian. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8415970

Thats what I said, or not?

Obsidian and Flint wounds heal better because steel blades "cut to good" and Obsidian blades "cut less good" (that is simplified) (Hard to explain in english: obsidian but more precisely flint edges have kind of little grooves, which are more "healthy" for the tissue when you cut).

How crystaline steel is, depends on the kind of steel. But your point that those crystals are bigger than one molecule is ofc true. However such crastals end by definition in a molecule, or an atom even, or not?

Regarding the single molecule myth: an obsidian or flint blade can be made to end in single molecules. Note the emphasizis. That means it is usually not that sharp. After a few usages on hard material the edge is no longer consisting of single molecule anyway.

Regarding the crystals: Obsidian or other vulcanic glasses are in amorph form after they formed. Usually over a few million years they reform into a crystal form. I don't really know which form was/is used to make blades.

"They were simply the fastest cells that were among those that were raced; many cells from various species of protists, not to mention sperm cells are capable of faster speeds than that."

The first thing that came to me was Listeria. These bacteria are intracellular pathogens, using the host cell's cytoskeleton (actin filaments) to shoot around the interior of the cell (and eventually punch through the cell wall IIRC) at 0.12-1.46 microns/sec, faster than the cells tested.

Oh for fucks sake. THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU.

Of course they do. As times keep on getting worse, the possibility of Joe 99% engaging in subversive actions gets ever greater, so if the 1% are to keep on looting the rest, they need to tighten the grip ever more. And of course, even in good times, "they" are people who love having power over others, either because they think they know better than everyone else or simply because they have issues.

There are no feds swooping in in black helicopters to dig through your garbage and piece together your shredded electric bill.

Of course not. It's spy drones for overall surveillance, sewage analysis to find any "undesirable" habits, and the electric bill goes to the government straight from the electric company.

Honestly, mods, giving positive reinforcement to this sort of paranoia is only hurting the people suffering from it.

Sadly, in the light of Carnivore and Palantir, I'd say it's not paranoia but well justified caution.

There is probably a solution out there somewhere, but it will take many more years of research to get to, if it's even possible. Some people say it isn't.

There is possibly a solution out there, but I know of no law of nature that requires there to be a reliable precursor signal, let alone a single, reliable, universally applicable signal.

It is plausible that particular faults may have reliable precursors along particular segments, but that a different fault would have different local circumstances, resulting in that particular precursor being useless. For example, a fault between crystalline basement blocks could well have a strong resistivity response in advance of fracture ; but 5km along the fault, you could have it in water-wet sedimentary cover, with a completely different resistivity response to accumulating stress.

In short, you may have to study and understand every single fault, and develop a specific prediction plan for each segment of that fault. And the unknown faults, like the blind thrust that "went" in a late-last-century Californian quake? That's a Rumsfeldian (?) "known unknown."

The problem of false positives and false negatives plagues the field. Which is not being helped by the prosecution of the Italian seismologists. You wouldn't catch me entering the field (I'm an oilfield geologist - pays quite nicely, thank you).

See my post above for earthquake mitigation comments, and also comments on the expected death toll for the next Ganges valley mega-quake.

Concerning this particular work ... I'm reading T.F.Paper ... which discusses groudwater changes recorded over Izmit 1999 (a friend of mine slept through that earthquake after her eclipse-chasing holiday ; she's never lived it down), carbon monoxide emissions from the ground (Gujarat, 2001 ; 0.25ppmv - that might be visible on a diver's CO meter?) , a suggestion of (electronic) hole formation and movement into the atmosphere to explain the diverse phenomena ... well it's a rational hypothesis.

BUT ... it depends on there being a linkage between the highly strained region of rock and the surface. Which with dry(-ish) crystalline basement, I can believe. But put a cover of sediments, particularly several kilometres of alternating mud-rock and sandstone/ limestones on top of your strained fault surface, and ask for it to transmit material (ions, holes, gases from oxidised organic matter) at rates of several kilometres per day? That's not going to work very well, IMHO.

Anyway ... it's a proposal. Lets put it to the test. Did this family of phenomena work for Parkfield? Strange - they make precisely *no* mention of Parkfield. Which is peculiar, given the amount of data collected. Trouble is, the data isn't nice and clean ; there's a nice sort-of-weekly trend in pore pressure, for example.

It doesn't look likely to fly to me. You're the seismology bod - are you convinced?

Either I neglected to save it (happens when you wind up with 15 windows open at once) or just can't find it... (went thru a bunch of PDFs and it's not there either)... I *think* I got there from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2902299/ which is basically the same topic. This one happens to be specific to levothyroxin; behaviour of other drugs probably varies, and should be looked at individually.

I have a login at WP but it usually refuses to let me save changes. :(

As others have mentioned, it's not the compression, per se, that's a problem. Up until fairly recently, any time a protein was sequenced it went into a central government database (or two). Now that high throughput sequencing is on the verge of being used for things like routine medical diagnosis, there's a need to decide what goes into the databases and what doesn't - or perhaps for some new specialized databases containing different subsets of the data.

But if you want to see what the data looks like you could try the NCBI Blast databases.

Done: NCBI, DDBJ, and Ensembl all perform that role. The problem is what to do with all of it.

It can't be cited other than by checking every single scientific study in all of history and seeing that nonw of them proof that ADIS is caused by HIV.

it can be trivially disproved by showing the proof of course.

For that we basically have Koch's Postulates.

1. The germ must be found in every host with the disease
There have been cases of of AIDS like symptoms without HIV:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8093633

They are very rare though, and just because something that isn't influenza can cause flu like symptoms doesn't mean influenza doesn't cause the flu.

Essentially everyone with AIDS tests positive for HIV, and >99% of people without AIDS test negative for HIV.

2. The germ must be isolated from the host and grown in pure culture
This is done routinely .

3. The germ must cause the disease when introduced into a susceptible healthy host.
4. The germ must be re-isolated from the infected host

Ethics prevent us from doing these steps for things we think will kill you.

However, there have been a few lab accidents in which workers have been infected with HIV (cultured HIV, not just say blood from an AIDS patient getting into their bloodstream, which would carry more than just HIV). All of them showed T-cell depletion. And HIV was then isolated from them and matched the one they had been infected with exactly.

http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/ma?f=102203749.html

Plus the dozens of health care workers who have contracted AIDS from mistakes with HIV+ blood/etc - clearly not as good as isolated HIV infection for showing it is HIV, but more volume.

It can't be cited other than by checking every single scientific study in all of history and seeing that nonw of them proof that ADIS is caused by HIV.

it can be trivially disproved by showing the proof of course.

For that we basically have Koch's Postulates.

1. The germ must be found in every host with the disease
There have been cases of of AIDS like symptoms without HIV:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8093633

They are very rare though, and just because something that isn't influenza can cause flu like symptoms doesn't mean influenza doesn't cause the flu.

Essentially everyone with AIDS tests positive for HIV, and >99% of people without AIDS test negative for HIV.

2. The germ must be isolated from the host and grown in pure culture
This is done routinely .

3. The germ must cause the disease when introduced into a susceptible healthy host.
4. The germ must be re-isolated from the infected host

Ethics prevent us from doing these steps for things we think will kill you.

However, there have been a few lab accidents in which workers have been infected with HIV (cultured HIV, not just say blood from an AIDS patient getting into their bloodstream, which would carry more than just HIV). All of them showed T-cell depletion. And HIV was then isolated from them and matched the one they had been infected with exactly.

http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/ma?f=102203749.html

Plus the dozens of health care workers who have contracted AIDS from mistakes with HIV+ blood/etc - clearly not as good as isolated HIV infection for showing it is HIV, but more volume.

Yeah, keep bleating "4 legs good, 2 legs bad." You can swallow the bullshit if you want, but the system is coming around to a better understanding of arteriosclerosis, aka atherosclerosis. For example, see Inflammation and atherosclerosis, Inflammation in atherosclerosis, and a lot of other research. Your "high LDL, low HDL" blood content has a correlation with arteriosclerosis, but which is the cause and which the response? Eh?

Pay special attention to findings like:

... certain treatments that reduce coronary risk also limit inflammation. In the case of lipid lowering with statins, this anti-inflammatory effect does not appear to correlate with reduction in low-density lipoprotein levels.

You are also seeing conventional medicine slowly (much too slowly) come around to an understanding what a wonderful food the egg is, how the phobia about butter and the fad for margarine have not been a good thing, and other truths you would probably label as quackery.

Deposits of cholesterol are the body's response to arterial pathology, not the cause of it.

Yeah, keep bleating "4 legs good, 2 legs bad." You can swallow the bullshit if you want, but the system is coming around to a better understanding of arteriosclerosis, aka atherosclerosis. For example, see Inflammation and atherosclerosis, Inflammation in atherosclerosis, and a lot of other research. Your "high LDL, low HDL" blood content has a correlation with arteriosclerosis, but which is the cause and which the response? Eh?

Pay special attention to findings like:

... certain treatments that reduce coronary risk also limit inflammation. In the case of lipid lowering with statins, this anti-inflammatory effect does not appear to correlate with reduction in low-density lipoprotein levels.

You are also seeing conventional medicine slowly (much too slowly) come around to an understanding what a wonderful food the egg is, how the phobia about butter and the fad for margarine have not been a good thing, and other truths you would probably label as quackery.

Deposits of cholesterol are the body's response to arterial pathology, not the cause of it.

Medical science is not certain at all that drinking cranberry juice helps with UTIs: http://nccam.nih.gov/research/results/spotlight/011011.htm

Cranberry juice salespeople are very certain of it, though. They have done very well at spreading the meme to medical professionals. Vitamin pill salespeople still do very well from Vit C sales, despite Vit C supplementation being shown to have no effect on the incidence or duration of colds.

I like this as a representation of the utility of various supplements and other dietary interventions: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements/

Just FYI about generics and lipitor (atorvastatin). Lipitor falls in a class of molecules called statins, all of which inhibit the exact same enzyme (HMGCoA reductase, the rate limiting step in cholesterol biosynthesis). Although they all are somewhat distinct due to being different molecules: they may have different absorption, excretion, off target effects (side effects), efficiency at inhibiting the desired enzyme, etc. But the point is, there already exist generic statins...

Statins can inhibit many other cellular processes besides cholesterol synthesis such as coenzyme Q10 synthesis (involved in ATP energy production, pretty important, so it's no wonder there are side-effects). Hopefully the loss of patent will cause drug companies to find new drugs with less side effects (like the dual inhibitors discussed in basic research here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21903868, though that the molecules discussed don't seem realistic, but the approach is reasonable).

No, part of me wonders the same thing. There has been research published recently that suggests that the link between serum cholesterol and cardiovascular disease may not be as direct as once thought. If the thing that we're measuring does not have a direct correlation to future disease, then the drug we're taking to lower the measurement might not have any real benefit. Statins like Lipitor have probably improved the health of a lot of people, but they may still be overprescribed.

I mean, TFA itself says Lipitor is "the best-selling drug of all time." Really? Would that many people really have died of heart attacks had they not been prescribed this drug?

People talk about how "modern diet, modern society is killing us" -- again, really? You should have seen how my grandfather ate. He'd trim the thick ribbons of fat from the ends of his pork chops so he could eat them last, then he'd eat the fat off everybody else's plate. He lived to a reasonable age, long before statins were ever invented. Sure, that's anecdotal, but where are the statistics? Was heart disease caused by high cholesterol really that much more common among my grandfather's generation? Or my father's? So much more common that it proves that almost everybody ought to be on Lipitor? My gut tells me no. Some studies from England (where my grandfather lived) suggest rates of heart disease did increase through the postwar years, but then started to decline in the 1970s -- again, before statins were even available. One does have to wonder.

http://xkcd.com/552/

Or, if we cut the hyperbole and use science: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3053361/

While the limited data for the GBR prior to the 1980's suggests that coral cover was higher than in our survey, we found no evidence of consistent, system-wide decline in coral cover since 1995. Instead, fluctuations in coral cover at subregional scales (10–100 km), driven mostly by changes in fast-growing Acroporidae, occurred as a result of localized disturbance events and subsequent recovery.>/i>

(ENSO events regularly kill reefs, and they promptly grow back)

That was definitely not my only source, just the summary of it. I'm curious where you found that "the U.S. government itself claimed that those treatments were likely effective against cancer." The patent application (here) for the synthesis of what he calls A-10 only says he claims (or claims to have shown) that it is effective against cancer. And per the National Cancer Institute here:"No randomized, controlled trials showing the effectiveness of antineoplastons have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. " and "Nonrandomized clinical trials are ongoing at Dr. Burzynski’s clinic to study the effect of antineoplastons on cancer. (See Question 6.)" Full list of answers to questions here, including a list of the fairly nasty side effects (and, BTW, if you are going to indirectly cite a source you really should have seen these things for yourself.) In other words, no proper studies have ever been performed (there where several, such as at the Mayo Clinic, one of the most respected cancer treatment centers in America: it was canceled due to ethical concerns because the treatment showed poor results after two years. Zero regressions, several deaths, and severe side effects. The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has a good summary here).

On the other hand, the only sources I could find praising antineoplastons where sites like this (here specifically). That was the second site for "antineoplastons" on Google too. And in any cases which they say it has been shown to work, no source is referenced. The only outside link on the blurb was to the Burzynski clinic itself. No scientific cancer institute, and especially not the National Cancer Institute, has said antineoplastons work.

"Ongoing studies" is completely meaningless. I could register a "study" on the effects of gasoline on fire. That wouldn't give my work any scientific credibility, except among ignorant hope-seeking patients.

I did my research, TYVM. I'm wondering how well you did yours. This only took me about 5 minutes.

You are confusing the actual meaning of homeopathy with the commonly used meaning.

True homeopathy is bunk. You dilute something with water to make it more effective and the more times you dilute it, the more powerful the effect? It's nonsensical.

In this context, homeopathic is a substitute for "naturally occurring substances used to treat symptoms". The product in your link includes 13.3mg of a zinc compound that has been shown to reduce the duration of the common cold. See here. The same study showed that people who regularly took Zinc Gluconate Glycine had fewer colds per year. It's not a scam, it's real data confirmed by the NIH.

13.3mg in each lozenge is more than you'd get in an Olympic sized swimming pool of a true homeopathic remedy.

There is a world of difference between the two. One is rot, gibberish and criminally fraudulent nincompoopery. The other is a scientifically proven remedy that happens to use pharmacologically active substances that happen to not be covered by billion dollar patents. That branch of medicine is just as valid as any other.

LK

If your wife is pestering you to get snipped, you should call it what it is. Abuse. Trying to pressure someone into a medical procedure they don't want, and have no real need for is horribly abusive. Tell her to go get snipped herself. When she trots out the old lie that it is major surgery for her, just point her to the National Institute of Health's evaluation of it. And let her know it is a simple 30 minute outpatient procedure.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002913.htm

If you were joking, ignore that, or file it away as trivia to be used for some other joke in the future.

That BS is really annoying. The claims over difficulty and dangers of getting tubes tied is VASTLY over stated. Tubal ligation is a 30 minute out patient procedure. Women love to declare it as some huge health risk that requires days in the hospital and weeks of recovery, and men buy into it. It isn't, and it doesn't. The lie is part of our "hate the penis culture".

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002913.htm

Tubal ligation is basically on par with vasectomies in difficulties and risk. Here is an idea. If the man knows he never wants to have another child he should get a vasectomy. If the woman knows she never wants another child, she should get tubal ligation. If they both know that they never want children, they should both get sterilized, and exponentially improve their odds of achieving their goals.

IANAV, but is this the paper they are talking about? At least it seems to be about the same subject: Multidrug Resistant 2009 A/H1N1 Influenza Clinical Isolate with a Neuraminidase I223R Mutation Retains Its Virulence and Transmissibility in Ferrets

This asshat's ego is what has caused [...] an engineered avian flu that can kill off half the planet's population

Actually, that would be the NIH ( http://www.nih.gov/ ), who requested that this research be done, funded it, etc.;
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/11/scientists-brace-for-media-storm.html

And really, I'd rather they do research it and find some manner of defense against it than that some actual 'asshats' figure it out and use it as a weapon first, or nature finds its own way to such a 'killer virus', without a defense in place.

The only particularly troubling time is when these findings are made public, because among the "ZOMG WE'RE DOOMED" people like you there's always the chance that there's one complete nutcase who goes to such a research facility to try and disrupt the work - and inadvertently releases things into the wild with far worse consequences.

That's not to say it shouldn't be made public - just that the designation of risk is often misplaced.

Besides, the world doesn't hate scientists - if they did, the world should be largely Amish (actually, they don't even hate scientists, but their lifestyle would come close to one in which a society does hate scientists).

It isn't what you know, it's what you know that isn't so, that will bite you in the rump :-)

They see in black and white, as is widely known;

Please don't continue to spread misinformation about dogs "only seeing black and white".

Dogs are dichromatic, not monochromatic. They see color - just not the same as we do.

Spectrum of what dogs actually see

Your misunderstanding is the same as people who think that someone who is red-green colorblind can't tell the difference, which is false.

Second, dogs flicker rate is well below my plasma TV's 600hz ..., and far below the refresh rate on LCD backlights. They will not see any flicker whatsoever, and neither will you, no matter how much you try.

Doing my undergrad I would daily walk past some fairly macabre before and after photos of the treatments. A blackened foot which normally would have been removed and an after photo of the same foot that had been treated. The process was rather simple, cut the foot wide open and slather the correct strain of phage allowing for the drainage after the fact.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2095089/
http://blogs.evergreen.edu/phage/

.

If it was good enough for Feynman, it's good enough for me.

And what is a phage but a biological nanomachine dedicated to killing bacteria, anyway?

", but they can also be different from the reactions a human has"
yeah, no shit. everyone knows that. Mice is just a testing step. It a great way to look at cell interactions, and responce.

"may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn."
no, they aren't. We know the constraints. If you find a way to test without those constraints, by all means let researchers know.

" a species that doesn't seem to get cancer on its own, "
can't wait to learn why, might help us all.

Look, having a mouse that gets a specific type of cancer at 3 months, 99.999% of the time(it's actually higher) is very valuable for research.

TO sume up,

Using mice isn't absolutely perfect for all case, and some species have interesting properties we can learn from.

""The inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today—raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics—"
What a bunch of alarmist propaganda. I mean, if you don't have facts or knowledge on your side,. use alarmists word and FUD.

oh and this bit of crap:

""This is important for scientists," says Mattson, "but they don't think about it at all.""
What? every scientist I have ever talked to that does lab work is aware of this. Is this Matterson guy selling something? Clearly he is qualified, but every time I here a scientist talk about lab work with mice, this very subject comes up, and they always point out that just because it happens in mice doesn't mean we will see any affect on people.

And the graph. OMG look at how much more study on rats there is! ahhh!!

well, they are cheaper AND are a first step. So of course they are used. When there is no effect, no other animal is tests so of course it will show fewer of other type of animal is used later in the process.

OTOH, maybe only the scientist I listen to and talk to mention this, and none other do.

The man has the cred:
http://www.grc.nia.nih.gov/branches/irp/mmattson.htm

But I am confused on his statements on mice as if no one knows about those issues.
I wonder how much the reported misrepresented what he said?

While it is true that there is no evidence for horizontal transfer of the genes inserted into GM plants for selection, the fact remains that antibiotic resistant genes do have something to do with GMO. I was responding to the assertion that antibiotic resistant genes and GMO are completely exclusive topics.

Though I have to concede that the second part of my reply, while theoretically possible, however seems to be false in practice. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21722080

Do you have a source for this? I'm not saying you're wrong, just wondering about the basis for the claim. It strikes me as possibly being one of those "common sense" ideas that turns out not to be true when you actually crunch the numbers.

I can't find comparative figures but this BMJ article highlights the issue

I'll copy it here:

By the way, here are some key useful health related links, and these are some of the issues I'd like to use such a system to discuss, refine, rebut, or promote.

On healthy diet:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Food-Revolution-Your-Diet-World/dp/1573244872
http://www.amazon.com/Diet-New-America-John-Robbins/dp/0915811812

Knife and blender skills for eating better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RhfAE6McrM
http://greensmoothierevolution.com/

On medically supervised fasting (both water and juice) and health:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-dr-fuhrman-on-fasting....
http://www.healthpromoting.com/why-water-fasting
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/

And on getting enough vitamin D (in decreasing levels of recommended supplements):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d...
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx

On vitamin D and pregnancy:
http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20100504/high-doses-of-vitamin-d-may-cut-...
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions...

On autism and health care in general:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_...

Understanding about good and bad fats:
http://peakperformance.runnersworld.com/2011/05/may-9-the-great-fat-deba...
http://nutsci.org/2011/05/04/the-great-fat-debate/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21515108

Mental health:
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene

Treadmill workstations for computer users (but be sure to get vitamin D being indoors so much):
http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/08/the-treadmill-workstation/
http://www.squidoo.com/wal

Looks like the effectiveness article you linked was pretty well shot down in the comments in that article

Yes, because posters in an Internet comment section are always more credible than peer-reviews scientific studies.

As far as mandatory, that is where the big pay-off comes

... for the big pharma corporations. What are you, a shill?

This being vastly cheaper, and more effective than just having the well off people getting vaccinated forever.

No, it's much more expensive, because it's all patented right now. That's the point of the big PR campaign and rush to get the vaccines out there, while they can charge patent-protected prices for it.

Your reference is old. The newer one (at the top of the link you listed) says $38.5k for a newly minted postdoc. Close enough to the numbers I listed as to make no difference. So I'd guess that those averages, small sample though they are, are probably about right, and the NIH pays low, which squares with what I've heard from my life sciences buds, compared to physics and engineering.

You said A typical FTE for a grad student /postdoc is around 40k/yr. My numbers are closer to right than yours, and you're sending me documentation to prove it. Feel free to send me any documentation of overhead rates you find. I just know what they are here, and at the four other institutions, academic and otherwise, that I've worked. They're not 30%. Postdoc FTEs, even at the low end, are not 40k.

/.'er reason above also verified that $250k was a reasonable estimate for a scientist FTE, which you had originally put at "Hahahaaaahhahahahahaaaa."

I'm not writing off anything less than $1M as chump change, and I'm not writing off $40k as chump change. But I'm not kidding myself about how much it costs just to get people in the lab, and I think you are underestimating it significantly.

Your Caltech average salary is sourcing 10 postdocs at Caltech. There are a lot more than that, I am sure, so I think that is a fairly selective sampling. Here are the NIH guidelines for postdoc salaries in 2010,

http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/not-od-10-047.html

Most labs pay less than the NIH, unless they have a lot of funding. Also, postdocs are usually temporary positions lasting 1-3 yrs. So the top of the pay scale is often not reached. Now, I am using life science salaries as my benchmark because that is all I have experience with, but it is quite possible that other fields pay more.

I understand your point: science is expensive. But writing off anything less than $1 million as chump change is not very constructive. First of all, even if you can only hire one extra person, that is one extra person for one year. Other labs might use it to upgrade some equipment or something. Every little bit helps. $40k, for example, will buy a new rotor for a centrifuge, or a shaking incubator, or an hplc...all great things that don't usually fit into the day-to-day budgets of most labs. Second, nobody is suggesting that this funding will be enough to completely sustain a lab. Most labs need several grants going at any given time to keep the lights on. This is just a boost, and you can do a lot of experiments with $40k.

You think you're being very clever, but the green revolution has not fed anyone that otherwise would have starved.

Funny, pretty much every reputable source says otherwise. I guess all those prizes Norman Borlaug got were for his good looks.

Who told you that? That's not true, at all.

Pretty much every crop & soil scientist out there will tell you that.

The herbicides kill off beneficial nematodes and other organisms which live in the soil. Healthy topsoil can be over 40% living organic material. After using these herbicides, it drops to 0%.

And if that were the alternative you'd have a point. But the alternative is tillage. Inputs are never disirable, but it isn't a question of 'does this do harm' so much as 'does this do the least harm.'

google for "superbugs", the first time I ever did (relevant since google remembers what you've searched for) the first bunch of results were all relevant.

I know there's resistance but I've never heard of the resitnat weeds possessing any attributes besides their resistance (at least in this particular case anyway).

The point I'm making is that engineering these plants to be pest-resistant or chemical-resistant is a loser's game, because they will become resistant to it themselves.

Uh, yeah. there's been a Red Queen's race in agriculture for ages. GE doesn't change that. Of course pests will develop resistance. That's always happened, it is always going to happen.

Meanwhile, there are potential harmful side effects, and indeed Bt corn has already gone toxic in the 20th generation (just try finding the citation any more, though. I'm sure I have a bookmark saved somewhere, maybe even scrapbook'd the article, but elefino where it is now. It was all over when it happened..

I think you mean this. Turned out to be a fungus, but the transgene go the public blame. Funny thing is, Bt corn is actually safer due to lower levels of mycotoxin. Corn that doesn't get chewed on has less open area for fungal infection which means lower mycotoxins.

That's because you're being disingenuous.

Nutrition facts describe the nutritional content of something. The variety used to make it is entirely different. Its the difference between knowing a car's MPG and knowing the elemental composition of the alloy used in the tailpipe.

That's a bunch of shit. It's not a common issue that has always been in agriculture, because the technology has never existed to do these things on this scale.

We've used herbicides before genetic engineering, and we've had resistant weeds before genetic engineering. There are even non-GE herbicide tollerant varieties of some crops out there. We've bred pest resistant varieties, and pests have overcome those varieties. For example, there's no GE wheat on the market, but they still use herbicides on wheat, and they still have pest issues that require new varieties. Surely you don't deny this? And surely you're not calling the notion that a Rainbow papaya is different from Golden Rice is different from Arctic apple is different from Bt corn to be a bunch of shit?

Attacking a straw man is still a fallacy, and it's what you're doing, because I never said nature knew what it was doing; in fact, I said it didn't.

You started off by advocating organic agriculture. If you don't think that's an appeal to nature, either you don't know what an appeal to nature is or you don't know what organic farming is.

I was just trying to make the point that we are being force-fed GM foods

Who, exactly, is forcing you to eat genetically engineered food? Because there's a huge difference between you being too lazy to learn what is GE and what isn't, and someone forcing you to eat it. You're free not to eat it. You're free to buy organic food, or foods containing only crops that aren't genetically engineered. That's like a Muslim saying he's being force fed non-Halal beef. Saying you're being 'force-fed' GE crops is just being dramatic and deceitful.

And before you give me the ever popular 'oh but its not labeled so how do I know?' schtick, then listen up: corn, soy, canola, cotton, papaya (from Hawaii), summer squash, and soon, suger beet and alfalfa. If it has those in it, assume its GE. No other crop currently on the market is GE (well, there were potatoes and tomatoes but they were discontinued, and in Iran they've got GE rice). 15 seconds on Google, now you don't have to play the lazy victim anymore. You're welcome. And for reference, guess what else isn't labeled: fruit from grafted trees or vegetables/grains from hybrid seed. Not the same thing? Funny because throughout history people have made the same accusations at them that people make at GE crops today. I get that agricultural history is pretty boring but it sure is insightful. In fact, no plant improvement method is labeled. If you didn't want food produced with mutagens, induced polyploidy, tissue culture/somaclonal variation, marker assisted breeding, sport selection, your argument holds the same weight. What if I don't want wheat bred from strains altered with mutagenic radiation, or apples selected from sports, or bananas produced from tissue cultured clones plants, or citrus with extra chromosomes? Because guess what, they're all there, on the market, right now, no labeling, no safety testing. The only difference is that no one's ever made stink about them. You're irrationally singling out one thing while irrationally ignoring all the other genetic changes that are made to crops, which are almost always much larger and much more random and less understood than inserting a gene or two with GE

there have been no long term studies as to safety.

So, these studies, this study, this one, this one, this one, didn't happen, and neither did any of these. You might want to do a bit more research before making statements like that. You know, they don't need to do safety testing for any other type of plant improvement, which is genetic modification (although not genetic engineering). I'm not saying they shouldn't be tested, but these things are plants, not drugs. If there isn't anything new in the that is biologically active, there is no reason to think that they're suddenly going to be dangerous (at least, no more than there is for any other type of genetic alteration). The cry proteins & EPSPS proteins (the two main ones inserted in GE crops right now) are NOT dangerous. That's not my opinion, that is the conclusion of pretty much all the literature on the subject, and just you haven't read it doesn't make it any less true.

Call me crazy, but I still want to make my own life choices, and not have the government and corporations make them for me.

Crazy, maybe not, but uninformed, absolutely. And government and corporations are not making the decision for you, they're making it for everyone else. If farmers want to g

I was just trying to make the point that we are being force-fed GM foods

Who, exactly, is forcing you to eat genetically engineered food? Because there's a huge difference between you being too lazy to learn what is GE and what isn't, and someone forcing you to eat it. You're free not to eat it. You're free to buy organic food, or foods containing only crops that aren't genetically engineered. That's like a Muslim saying he's being force fed non-Halal beef. Saying you're being 'force-fed' GE crops is just being dramatic and deceitful.

And before you give me the ever popular 'oh but its not labeled so how do I know?' schtick, then listen up: corn, soy, canola, cotton, papaya (from Hawaii), summer squash, and soon, suger beet and alfalfa. If it has those in it, assume its GE. No other crop currently on the market is GE (well, there were potatoes and tomatoes but they were discontinued, and in Iran they've got GE rice). 15 seconds on Google, now you don't have to play the lazy victim anymore. You're welcome. And for reference, guess what else isn't labeled: fruit from grafted trees or vegetables/grains from hybrid seed. Not the same thing? Funny because throughout history people have made the same accusations at them that people make at GE crops today. I get that agricultural history is pretty boring but it sure is insightful. In fact, no plant improvement method is labeled. If you didn't want food produced with mutagens, induced polyploidy, tissue culture/somaclonal variation, marker assisted breeding, sport selection, your argument holds the same weight. What if I don't want wheat bred from strains altered with mutagenic radiation, or apples selected from sports, or bananas produced from tissue cultured clones plants, or citrus with extra chromosomes? Because guess what, they're all there, on the market, right now, no labeling, no safety testing. The only difference is that no one's ever made stink about them. You're irrationally singling out one thing while irrationally ignoring all the other genetic changes that are made to crops, which are almost always much larger and much more random and less understood than inserting a gene or two with GE

there have been no long term studies as to safety.

So, these studies, this study, this one, this one, this one, didn't happen, and neither did any of these. You might want to do a bit more research before making statements like that. You know, they don't need to do safety testing for any other type of plant improvement, which is genetic modification (although not genetic engineering). I'm not saying they shouldn't be tested, but these things are plants, not drugs. If there isn't anything new in the that is biologically active, there is no reason to think that they're suddenly going to be dangerous (at least, no more than there is for any other type of genetic alteration). The cry proteins & EPSPS proteins (the two main ones inserted in GE crops right now) are NOT dangerous. That's not my opinion, that is the conclusion of pretty much all the literature on the subject, and just you haven't read it doesn't make it any less true.

Call me crazy, but I still want to make my own life choices, and not have the government and corporations make them for me.

Crazy, maybe not, but uninformed, absolutely. And government and corporations are not making the decision for you, they're making it for everyone else. If farmers want to g

What kind of dystopian hell-hole do you live in where you can be jailed for having traces of drug metabolites in your system?

Nine U.S. states actually explicitly ban 'internal possession' of alcohol - alcohol detectable by blood, breath, or urine test - by individuals under 21.

Several of those states, oddly enough, make it legal for under-21s to consume alcohol in specific settings (often in their home, or under the supervision of adults or guardians.) Missouri has no restrictions on consumption by under-21s, but does bar internal possession.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093169/

The cesarean delivery group had significantly higher IQ test scores.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10047/

Based on morphological and behavioral criteria and on comparisons with other primates, Portmann (1941,1945) suggested that human gestation should really last 21 months instead of 9. However, no woman could deliver a 21-month-old fetus because the head would not pass through the birth canal; thus, humans give birth at the end of 9 months. Montagu (1962) and Gould (1977) have suggested that during our first year of life, we are essentially extrauterine fetuses, and they speculate that much of human intelligence comes from the stimulation of the nervous system as it is forming during that first year.*

Portmann A. Die Tragzeiten der Primaten und die Dauer der Schwangerschaft beim Menschen: Ein Problem der vergleichen Biologie. Rev. Suisse Zool. 1941;48:511–518.
Portmann A. Die Ontogenese des Menschen als Problem der Evolutionsfor-schung. Verh. Schweiz. Naturf. Ges. 1945;125:44–53.
Montagu, M. F. A. 1962. Time, morphology, and neoteny in the evolution of man. In M. F. A. Montagu (ed.), Culture and Evolution of Man. Oxford University Press, New York.
Gould, S. J. 1977. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093169/

The cesarean delivery group had significantly higher IQ test scores.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10047/

Based on morphological and behavioral criteria and on comparisons with other primates, Portmann (1941,1945) suggested that human gestation should really last 21 months instead of 9. However, no woman could deliver a 21-month-old fetus because the head would not pass through the birth canal; thus, humans give birth at the end of 9 months. Montagu (1962) and Gould (1977) have suggested that during our first year of life, we are essentially extrauterine fetuses, and they speculate that much of human intelligence comes from the stimulation of the nervous system as it is forming during that first year.*

Portmann A. Die Tragzeiten der Primaten und die Dauer der Schwangerschaft beim Menschen: Ein Problem der vergleichen Biologie. Rev. Suisse Zool. 1941;48:511–518.
Portmann A. Die Ontogenese des Menschen als Problem der Evolutionsfor-schung. Verh. Schweiz. Naturf. Ges. 1945;125:44–53.
Montagu, M. F. A. 1962. Time, morphology, and neoteny in the evolution of man. In M. F. A. Montagu (ed.), Culture and Evolution of Man. Oxford University Press, New York.
Gould, S. J. 1977. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

This is a complete misunderstanding of what the canfield ocean was, or what the paper describing it was about. A more complete description of the paper can be found here. This is one of those things taken completely, completely out of context by a bunch of panic mongers. The actual paper is here.

Hypocapnia is when you don't have enough CO2 in your blood.

I have a bookmark for a .co.uk medical gas supplier on another computer. They have PDFs of their products' Material Safety Data Sheets. As I recally, they have Oxygen, Oxygen +5% CO2, Plain Air + 5% CO2, straight CO2 (for anesthesia), etc.

But I did find a printout of this page: Hyperoxia-Induced Hypocapnia. The practical implication of this piece is that every old person who has been prescribed oxygen by their doctor is also being poisoned. This creates more things to treat, so it's good for the medical system, but not so good for the patient.

If you're going to be on oxygen, 5% CO2 should always be blended in...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18396555

Claims 111 to 213 mg of Hg ions per Kg of soil, which seems a wee bit high. mg per Kg is basically a wordy version of PPM. I'm not sure if that scales, that would imply all of China's dirt added together would be some multiple of the total planetary store of Hg, wouldn't it?. Note this is the dirt that is washed off the mountains annually, so its probably the highest possible soil concentration.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2005JG000061.shtml

Claims plain ole Canadian forest dirt has 200 ng/g aka PPB. That seems like a reasonable number. High enough to fit with historical coal burning, low enough not to instantly kill anything grown in it, etc. Note this is just "bulk dirt"

I suppose soil levels in China could very well be 1000 times higher than in a forest in rural Canada.

As for the thermometer, fever thermometers used to have somewhat less than a gram of metallic non-ionized mercury. I am no expert on rectal thermometers. But I'm willing guess "somewhere in the gram level" is about right. Think about it for a second, goatse aside, the orifice is usually smaller than the mouth the oral thermometers use.

So to make one thermometer, you need something like all the soil in an entire medium sized Canadian farm, or a couple shovel fulls of Chinese dirt.

The big problem is liquid thermometers were made with Hg decades ago, alcohol solutions a decade or two ago, and are electronic now. Somebody putting Hg in your rear in 2011 is making a weird internet video, not doing a legitimate medical procedure.

How did they simulate zero gravity and its adverse effects on the human body??

This has already been done years ago. You can simulate the influence of microgravity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlessness#Microgravity on the cardiovascular system and the skeleton using so called head down bed rest. The idea is if you are laying down at a down tilt of e.g. 5 degrees and are not allowed to stand up or sit up during the experiment you can simulate both the influence on the cardiovascular system and the unloading of the bones.

In the late 1980ies a 370-day-long head down tilt bed rest experiment was carried out in the Soviet Union, which is the bed rest study of the longest duration yet. This study showed that it was possible to counteract the immobilization induced bone loss by doing 1-2 hours of exercise per day combined with treatment with a pharmaceutical (a bisphosphonate, which is part of a group of agents that is currently used for treating/preventing osteoporosis [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphosphonate]). A control group who did not do any countermeasures experienced a significant loss of bone mass after 120 days of bed rest, after which they also stated the same exercise regimen as the other participants and seemed to regain some of the lost bone.

Citation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16235873
(For reasons that is not clear to me this study was not published and the samples were put on storage unanalyzed until we got access to them. We analyzed the bone samples and published them with the original investigators from Russia and France.)

Certainly not daylight, but probably quite visible to any decent gamma ray detector. If you did a Google Earth but at the gamma or x-ray frequencies, the Irish Sea would certainly be the brightest mass of water anywhere in the world and quite possibly THE brightest mass of anything outside of the remnants of nuclear test sites.

Well, the one from the NRPB might be a better one to look at. There have certainly been more than 5 cases - indeed the only 5 I could see in this report is to a specific section in the references. The Gardner Report, which DOES mention 5 cases, refers to 5 cases that occurred in a specific time interval over the entire nation where 4 of those occurred in Seascale. The Gardner Report is the one which is the most-cited reference to childhood leukemia in Britain.

In fact, the table at the bottom-right for the Gardner Report is the most interesting for this purpose - a six-fold rise in leukemia incidents in the region surrounding Seascale with levels of leukemia remaining (a) constant and (b) at expected levels everywhere else over the same time period.

Radionuclide research groups *fried* the attempts by BNFL to conceal the link at the time and would doubtless be disgusted by the other posters here trying to attribute the cancers to "natural lead poisoning". I look forward to seeing these alleged papers "proving" that these distinguished experts were wrong and that a pseud-anonymous Slashdot poster is so vastly better and brighter that they can identify a wholly imagined lead isotope as the cause without having done an ounce of legwork.

Other links to papers that may be of interest:

• The Seascale childhood leukaemia cases-the mutation rates implied by paternal preconceptional radiation doses
• Childhood leukemia and radioactive discharges at Seascale
• Leukemia Clusters Near La Hague and Sellafield
• The CERRIE Report
• An index of anything I might have forgotten

Certainly not daylight, but probably quite visible to any decent gamma ray detector. If you did a Google Earth but at the gamma or x-ray frequencies, the Irish Sea would certainly be the brightest mass of water anywhere in the world and quite possibly THE brightest mass of anything outside of the remnants of nuclear test sites.

Well, the one from the NRPB might be a better one to look at. There have certainly been more than 5 cases - indeed the only 5 I could see in this report is to a specific section in the references. The Gardner Report, which DOES mention 5 cases, refers to 5 cases that occurred in a specific time interval over the entire nation where 4 of those occurred in Seascale. The Gardner Report is the one which is the most-cited reference to childhood leukemia in Britain.

In fact, the table at the bottom-right for the Gardner Report is the most interesting for this purpose - a six-fold rise in leukemia incidents in the region surrounding Seascale with levels of leukemia remaining (a) constant and (b) at expected levels everywhere else over the same time period.

Radionuclide research groups *fried* the attempts by BNFL to conceal the link at the time and would doubtless be disgusted by the other posters here trying to attribute the cancers to "natural lead poisoning". I look forward to seeing these alleged papers "proving" that these distinguished experts were wrong and that a pseud-anonymous Slashdot poster is so vastly better and brighter that they can identify a wholly imagined lead isotope as the cause without having done an ounce of legwork.

Other links to papers that may be of interest:

• The Seascale childhood leukaemia cases-the mutation rates implied by paternal preconceptional radiation doses
• Childhood leukemia and radioactive discharges at Seascale
• Leukemia Clusters Near La Hague and Sellafield
• The CERRIE Report
• An index of anything I might have forgotten

Its a bit easier with mathematics, engineering and computer science papers as your equations and methodology must be clearly spelled out, and generally it will get checked out by the reviewers, and they know what to expect usually for data. I.e. general behaviors, expected distributions for certain processes, etc. If you are bullshitting they can usually pick it out. Some of them are real assholes as well about nit-picking through everything. Essentially, psychology is too subjective to be considered a science in my opinion, and should have stricter requirements for having papers accepted. Psychology students should at least take some upper level mathematics and stats courses along with some scientific ethics classes to get their PhD so they know how not to bias their conclusions. A good example of how easy it is to screw with definitions to get any result you want from data is the "Does eating a meal on a big plate mean you will eat more?" problem. People genuinely thought this was true but as it turns out, if you redefine what a "large" plate is, what a "medium" plate is, and what a "small" plate is you can pretty much get any result you want. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2129126/, this example is a pretty good one because it shows that suppose if you had an agenda against big plates, you could prove yourself right without actually fabricating anything through your misunderstanding of statistics and experimentation.