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Following the funding >> climate-alarmism logic, then Lindzen must be an alarmist, for I believe he receives federal funding for his research.

Work reported here was done cooperatively with E. Schneider, C. Giannitsis, and D. Kirk-Davidoff. This work was supported by Grant 914441-ATM from the National Science Foundation and GrIant NAGW 525 from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Ten percent of this research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Institute of Global Environmental Change (NIGEC) through the NIGEC Northeast Regional Center at Harvard University (Department of Energy Cooperative Agreement DE-FC03-90ER61010) and through the Computer Hardware, Advanced Mathematics and Model Physics program. Financial support does not constitute an endorsement by the Department of Energy of the views expressed in this article.

So, yes. You can dissent and still be funded by the government. (To be fair, he's only dissenting with the "alarmism", and not the general science.)

"When the published and unpublished trials [from a FOIA request] were pooled, the placebo duplicated about 80% of the antidepressant response; 57% of these pharmaceutical company-funded trials failed to show a statistically significant difference between antidepressant and inert placebo. [...] This modest efficacy and extremely high rate of placebo response are not seen in the treatment of well-studied imbalances such as insulin deficiency, and casts doubt on the serotonin hypothesis."

"When the published and unpublished trials [from a FOIA request] were pooled, the placebo duplicated about 80% of the antidepressant response; 57% of these pharmaceutical company-funded trials failed to show a statistically significant difference between antidepressant and inert placebo. [...] This modest efficacy and extremely high rate of placebo response are not seen in the treatment of well-studied imbalances such as insulin deficiency, and casts doubt on the serotonin hypothesis."

Instead of ads, perhaps people and doctors should refer to the only site you really ever need: http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/about.cfm.

At work (a pharma company) today my department (QA) was told we were going to help with Good Promotional Practices for the next year. People have to remember that half the reason that these ads are so oblique lies with government regulations, which make ads both good (ethically) and bad (annoying to watch).

That's not too farfetched, turning human depot fat into fuel. According to this analysis of human depot fat, about 24% is palmitic acid, and 45% is oleic acid. I've got about 50kg extra to donate to the cause.

• http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/secondhandsmoke .html
• http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/secondhandsm oke/factsheets/factsheet6.html

Except that isn't the case with injecting into the CSF - you just stick a needle into someone's spine (very carefully). And I can't see how these things could penetrate the CSF without damaging the blood-brain barrier, possibly worse than a single needle.

The advantage is that it is possible to get your medical journal when you are visiting a different country, which in turn can improve the ability to get the correct medication and avoid medical hazards.

The disadvantage is that it may be used for privacy invasion. There are certainly other risks involved too not to forget the cost that may arise to unify all countries.

Anyway - one way to provide some patient security would be that identification of data and access control to personal data has to be restricted. A multi-level approach has to be in place for the best security. One way may be to use smartcard-equipped health-cards. The card will then hold the key to access of the data. Of course there has to be security measures involved too to handle lost cards etc.

And in order to find out if it's truly safe in the long term, someone is going to have to take some risk. How many things have been introduced not yet completely proven safe but are still regarded as safe today? The bad list includes asbestos, mercury, various radioactive products, etc. and looks pretty grim. I can't whip off a good list so easily since it doesn't make news, but I bet it includes some mundane things such as fire, raspberries, and potatoes (native to Peru and long thought to be poisonous by Europeans) as well as high tech stuff.

It's tragic when we mess up big, but it's our nature to be curious. Some will be more curious than others. But given a new substance or process similar to more well know substances or processes with no known or obvious dangers, it's considered ethical to proceed with using it. Of course, some classes of substances demand more caution than others. Drugs are highly regulated in the United States, the utility of which is debatable, but the regulations are a reflection of the values of that society.

Can you be sure whether heeled shoes cause schizoprenia or not?

'Non-invasive' is probably being redundantly used to quickly describe an EEG - given that most people don't know what one is.

Medical Encyclopedia - EEG
Electroencephalogram (EEG)

An electroencephalogram (EEG) is a test that measures and records the electrical activity of your brain by using sensors attached to your head and connected by wires to a computer.

Is it a wise move to allow such massive accumulation of wealth and power in what basicly amounts to a sociopathic organization?

"Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older -- about one in four adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year." c.f.

I bet it will turn out to be hard to look for funding for research on whether above areas are somehow connected.

CC.

Every study I've seen has shown that there is a statistical correlation between the levels of estrogen in the body, and the interest in math & science. The more estrogen, the less interested the subject becomes (for both boys and girls.)

I've not seen any such studies, and I'd be interested in reading them. Do you have any links? I tried searching scirus.com and only came up with links like this one and this one. (That is, not particularly relevant.)

Actually, using Google Scholar, I did find this PDF (from a law school professor) that suggests what you mention. From that article, I was able to use scirus to find this abstract (from the journal Neuroscience) which supports your position.

I guess it is somewhat indicative of the nature of the beast that although I've also published in Neuroscience, I've never heard of these studies.

My opinion is based upon other peoples (scientists) as yet unfinished scientific studies. Secondly "100+" years means nothing,

Show me the proof. This is really very simple. In 100+ years of strong magnetic fields, no one has yet shown proof of serious ill effects from magnetism. You believe in "unfinished scientific studies", which you haven't shown to us or even named. Claims demand proof.

things that are thought as safe often get proven to be dangerous, remember Marie Curie's glowing potato shed?

The cancer causing effects of radiation were noticed as early as 1902, a mere 4 years after the Curies began their experiments. What was not known was how much radiation was harmful, and how radioactive various things were.

Secondly, You quote three very valid types of employment who do work in close vacinity to magnetic fields. However, exposure assesments based on job title are a very crude method of assessing exposure due to the possibility of exposure misclassification. Also I used to string large electricity pylons I am still alive, I hope we both agree this prooves nothing.

WTF are you talking about? Are you saying that finding no particular increased incidence of illness in a group of people most of which work around high powered magnetic fields is not a meaningful observation? Why is selection based on job title (when job title obviously indicates exposure) not valid? What selection criteria should we be using? Star Trek nerds vs general population? Bearded ladies at sideshows vs general population?

"Studies so far [nih.gov] have shown that there is little negative reaction by organic systems to magnetic fields."

Sorry, but this realy means nothing to me. Please supply document addresses, rather than just a URL so I can "understand" what documents you are on about.

You're kidding, right? You know how hyperlinking works, don't you? Go back and look at my post. Notice how "studies so far" is underlined? That means you can click on it and, in this case, it leads to the actual reports. Here, allow me to give you the full address, itself hyperlinked to the report as well:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7033311&dopt=Citation

My response would be - "Theory, Hypothesis or Proof based?", I would find this out before patronising them.

Ummm....what? Those are not three different categories, those are three terms used when describing the scientific method as a whole. Theories are the overall idea, detailed by one or more hypotheses, supported by proof.

Then I am both. Moreso because I shall not stop being both whilst being in acceptance of this "fact".

"Claims must be supported by proof."

Do you believe this realy, when peoples lifes are in danger?

Until you can provide even a couple credible examples of people who have been harmed by magnetic fields, the danger is imaginary. I believe it's no more a danger than tomatoes, rock n' roll, and women's bare arms are a danger to morality--- and yet all those things were at one time seen as a threat. Seriousness of the charge has no bearing on the validity of the assertion. I believe your favorite shirt causes blindness to 78% of those who look upon it. Are you really going to continue wearing that shirt when it so clearly poses a danger to over 3/4 the population? You fiend!

Many medical cures are in opperation without proof.

Proof of what? That they cure? Aren't the cured people proof? Or if they don't cure, then what? The presence of useless medical procedures shows that magnetism causes cancer?

A quick search turned up an article from 1966 which suggests quantum tunneling in a protein, so the idea of quantum mechanics in biology isn't all that new (and probably predates the article). Disclaimer: I've only read the abstract, I don't do research in that area, those without a university hookup might not get to read it even if they really wanted to.

21 is not the age at which the brain has completed developing. Even if it were, there is no compelling medical reason to prevent the consumption of alcohol for people under the age of 21. Originally, when the law limiting the consumption of alcoholic beverages to people 21 or older was enacted, the voting age was also 21. States tried to reduce the drinking age during the 70s and 80s, but since the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1984, a state not enforcing the minimum drinking age of 21 would be subjected to a ten percent decrease in its annual federal highway apportionment. Overview of Underage Drinking Policy in the United States.

The NIH spends less than $30 billion per year, not all of which is for medical life-sciences research, so I'm not sure about your math. I guess spending more than Canada's total medical research budget on bioterrorism research alone is quite an accomplishment. Personally, I think both countries underfund medical research, and I agree with this guy

This is a complete load of crap. Penzim/Penzyme is one of these homeopathic claims that has NO support in the scientific community. The claims are bogus, there is no real research to back this up. Someone is hoping to be the new "shark cartilage" fad. Of course a slashvert helps a lot. Buyer beware!

As an example, take age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Genentech has developed and obtained approval for a drug to treat AMD: Lucentis. It's the most effective drug so approved, so it's prodigiously expensive.

It just so happens that Genentech has produced another drug that is very promising for AMD treatment, and is perhaps superior to Lucentis. This drug is Avastin, and it's already approved for colorectal cancer treatment, and is available much more cheaply than Lucentis.

Many doctors are now using Avastin off-label to treat AMD, but until it is officially approved for this purpose, such use will be limited. Genentech has no interest in seeking this approval, since it would replace sales of its very expensive drug (Lucentis) with sales of its much cheaper drug (Avastin).

This frustrating situation would likely continue until these drugs' patents expired, but it is of such importance to public health that the National Eye Institute (NEI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded a study to compare Avastin and Lucentis. So it is possible, if not very often, for government funding to solve these problems.

This crap is poison : http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/1998/Suppl-4/989-994 stacpoole/abstract.html and causes cancer.

Yeah. It kills cancer ... and your neurons : http://rarediseases.about.com/b/a/257426.htm

I wouldn't fund research on this either.

DCA

Look also at the following link in variosu treatment.

Please do not mod up at all. I assume everybody will look in google anyway. Hopefully

I did not find what I was searching : negative effect DL50 or DL90...

I've talked to librarians and information scientists, and they talk about "controlled vocabulary". They told me one of the best systems was Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi which is an index of essentially every article published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Every article is "tagged" with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) keywords, and you can search the database for those keywords. If they can use "heart" or "cardiac", they have to decide which one to use (they use "cardiac"). They have keywords to separate human studies from animal studies. Here's more explanation http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html It's basically open source.

A similar system in law is the Westlaw key word system. The New York Times used to have a great keyword index, but I can't find it in the NYT online.

I've talked to librarians and information scientists, and they talk about "controlled vocabulary". They told me one of the best systems was Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi which is an index of essentially every article published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Every article is "tagged" with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) keywords, and you can search the database for those keywords. If they can use "heart" or "cardiac", they have to decide which one to use (they use "cardiac"). They have keywords to separate human studies from animal studies. Here's more explanation http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html It's basically open source.

A similar system in law is the Westlaw key word system. The New York Times used to have a great keyword index, but I can't find it in the NYT online.

But in the Solaris case, I was able to download the new timezone files from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007a.tar.gz and extract the contents (the only file I needed was northamerica), and ran "zic northamerica" -- all was taken care of.

Look, I didn't throw that little tidbit about deaths in there so you could latch on to it and mount a full on straw man attack.

Sodium has been consistently clinically demonstrated to not have an extremely significant effect on blood pressure in the majority of the population, and even in those it does, cutting it produces only a temporary and mild drop.

Sodium is not the bogeyman. It will greatly benefit anyone with high blood pressure to lose some weight and examine the entirety of their diet for other excesses and deficiencies before automatically blaming sodium for high blood pressure.

Sodium is neither good nor bad news. It's one more substance vital to our lives that the panicky idiots in the media have demonized such that everyone out there who thinks he/she knows anything about nurtition will endlessly rip on it.

Sodium is not nearly as bad as many people have been lead to believe. Doctors will frequently tell their hypertension patients to cut as much sodium from their diets as possible, but this is because a portion of the population is hypersensitive to sodium, and there is no way to tell whether or not cutting sodium can help their blood pressure until a low sodium diet is tried. If the patient responds well to the low sodium intake, then other more drastic measures like medication can be avoided.

Keep in mind that until the advent of modern preservatives (the most commonly used one is still sodium) and refrigeration/freezing, the primary method of preserving a variety of foods involved salt curing, and many people of long ago had daily intakes of sodium that would be considered astronomical by today's standards, yet managed to find many interesting ways to die that didn't involve stroke or heart attack.

The more you know.

The article you're pulling all of this from has no attribution whatsoever, it's just an editorial-style piece. Can you back any of this up with references?

Some information on the multiple imputation method they are using can be found through a FAQ at Penn State's statistics department. To summarize, it's a standard statistical method for dealing with missing information. If there are 20 drivers and 5 of them refuse BAC testing - you can either completely remove those people from the data set and skew the numbers, or you can calculate the numbers from what is known.

You can find some more info on what the numbers are and why things are calculated the way they are in the NIAAA/NIH document: Trends in Alcohol-Related Fatal Traffic Crashes, United States, 1982-2004. They began using the multiple imputation method in 2004, and recalculated the info from 1982 until then. Statistically speaking, I would think that this happens all the time - if you get a better method of dealing with data, then you recalculate your numbers.

By definition all the instances you list as being included in "alcohol-related" are, in fact, alcohol related. You don't have to "wonder what alcohol-related actually means," and saying that things that involve alcohol are "considered alcohol-related" is a bit silly. If it involves alcohol, then it is alcohol-related. I would agree with what seems to be your point that you can't say that the number of drunk drivers is equivalent to the number of alcohol-related incidents. The number of drunk drivers goes into the alcohol-related numbers, but it's only one part. For example, if a drunk person stumbles out into the street and is hit by a sober driver then while it isn't a "drunk driving" incident, you can't argue that the incident isn't alcohol-related.

The NIAAA's definition of alcohol-related as of 2004 is "...a crash is considered as alcohol-related if either a driver or a nonoccupant (pedestrian or pedalcyclist) had a BAC of 0.01 g/dl or greater." You can feel free to argue about whether this is reasonable, but again by definition - a measurable amount of alcohol is a level that is able to be measured, ie above .00.

If you really want to "fight MADD," then you should be able to back up your information with references, with facts, as opposed to just reprinting what comes down to propaganda - which is the same thing they're being accused of. Numbers are meaningless unless you know what they mean... so back them up.

I don't know anything about the credentials of this research lab but the project does seem interesting. There are lots of published papers showing that short peptide sequences (~10 amino acids (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db= pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16 135080&query_hl=4&itool=pubmed_docsum)have potent effects on processes such as neural development, cell differentiation, cell survival etc. Whilst 10aa equates to 30 base pairs in DNA which is 3x bigger than those going to be investigated in the article, it just goes to show that there could be out there random sequences of DNA which could be translated into toxic peptides. It's not all doom and gloom - Imagine coupling a masked "kill" sequence to an antibody targeted to cancer cells - upon reaching it's target, through proteolytic degradation it could be converted into a potential anticancer drug. Discoveries such as these don't necessarily have to spell destruction to the world.

Pathetic resume of the PI.

5 references in PubMed! First reference in 1986! Come on. I have more references. And none of his references are him being first or last author.

In twenty years - 5 publications relevant to the field?

This should fix the problems for your Unix based machines. You can download a set of time zone source files from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/, these files are in the public domain. From these files you can build a full set of zoneinfo files (read the man page for zic(1)), DON'T FORGET TO BACKUP YOUR CURRENT ONES IN CASE OF PROBLEMS!! For most Linux based distros this is in a package called tzdata (which will compile the source files into zoneinfo files for you). zic(1) should put the compiled files into the right directory for you. These source files should work with most zic(1)'s, if not you may need to massage them with sed or perl. Don't forget to update /etc/localtime (or whatever other mechanism your OS uses, /etc/timezone et al) to set your localtime to the right zoneinfo file.

I couldn't access the mentioned paper, but I found another paper that I assume that review cited (Lindquist worked on both of them). The summary "CPEB prions might function in the formation of long-term memory" is probably though not certainly taken from:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleUR L&_udi=B6WSN-4C5RJXX-C&_coverDate=12%2F26%2F2003&_ alid=516758008&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_c di=7051&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000051401&_version=1 &_urlVersion=0&_userid=1082852&md5=817b088d824d789 e3c68039a6e013561

which talks about CPEB in Aplysia californica, the California sea slug. The results are pretty interesting, but it's unclear whether they apply to higher organisms. I haven't yet found anything where they test this in mice, but that doesn't mean the paper doesn't exist.

Another paper at

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/utils/fref.fcgi ?itool=AbstractPlus-def&PrId=3580&uid=12058449&db= pubmed&url=http://joi.jlc.jst.go.jp/JST.JSTAGE/jts /27.69?from=PubMed

found that: "Whereas the Zurich I Prnp null mice, as well as mice from a later PrP knockout line designated Edinburgh Prnp -/- (Manson et al., 1994) were clinically healthy, mice of other knockout lines, for example Nagasaki Prnp-/- (Sakaguchi et al., 1996) came down with ataxia and less of cerebellar Purkinje cells at 6-12 months of age. In the Zurich I and Edinburgh mice only the PrP open reading frame (ORF) was ablated or interrupted, while the lines developing ataxia had deletions extending from within the second Prnp intron to the 3' non-coding region [which runs into another gene called Doppel]."

To summarize: at this moment it doesn't seem that taking out only the coding region of PrP wrecks anything blatantly obvious in mice (though other papers I haven't cited show some other effects, not all of them neuro).

Quoted from Abstract of

"Fructose, insulin resistance, and metabolic dyslipidemia"

"A high flux of fructose to the liver, the main organ capable of metabolizing this simple carbohydrate, perturbs glucose metabolism and glucose uptake pathways, and leads to a significantly enhanced rate of de novo lipogenesis and triglyceride (TG) synthesis, driven by the high flux of glycerol and acyl portions of TG molecules from fructose catabolism."

Authors:
Heather Basciano,(1) Lisa Federico,(1) and Khosrow Adeli(1b)
(1) Clinical Biochemistry Division,
      Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology,
      Hospital for Sick Children,
      University of Toronto,
      Toronto, Ontario, Canada
(1b) Corresponding Author

Follow link below to abstract and link to Full Text article on Pubmed "... the U.S. National Library of Medicine's digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, providing free access to the full text of articles."

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcg i?tool=pmcentrez&rendertype=abstract&artid=552336

  This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Poster is NOT an author of the cited work.
Poster has NO relationship with any author or institution connected with cited work.

You have been infected with a rare and deadly disease. A new drug has become available. In clinical trials, if people are left untreated (control group), only 31% survive and the rest die. If they are given the drug, 69% survive. Do you take the drug, or ignore it because its effects are "unimpressive"? Because that example expresses an effect size of r=0.38.

The "anywhere else" you refer to is in areas of science that deal with deterministic phenomena. In many areas of social science, medicine, and other fields, the phenomena are probabilistic, and effect sizes are judged accordingly.

I keep telling you people there has to be something in the water

      No, you're thinking of a different parasite :)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7818640&dopt=Citation

Studies show it is ineffective: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12375295&dopt=Abstrac t You may wish to notify these ophthamologists.

From: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15232509&dopt=Citatio n

"we found a strong association between the introduction of FM radio broadcasting at full-body resonant frequencies and increasing melanoma incidence"

"Counties that did not roll out their FM-broadcasting network until several years after 1955 continued to have a stable melanoma mortality during the intervening years."

"We conclude that continuous disturbance of cell repair mechanisms by body-resonant electromagnetic fields seems to amplify the carcinogenic effects resulting from cell damage caused e.g. by UV-radiation."

Read the full paper here: http://www.msi.com.pl/pub/vol_10/no_7/4321.pdf

The air is full or all transmissions from radio, mobile masts, wifi and so on. I think that this technology is actually harming us and we should live more naturally.

The article isn't clear (and neither is the PubMed abstract on the study itself -- search for 17159008 to get the exact abstract), but after reading the abstract, I think TFA's headline is misleading. The study doesn't in fact seem to have addressed longevity, it addressed risk of death -- not the same thing at all. One's risk of death is higher the older the one gets. One's longevity is also higher the older one gets. However, a reduced risk of death over a particular span of years does not necessarily translate to a longer life.

So I'll rephrase my question: In the various studies they meta-analyzed, were the ages of the participants comparable?

A hypothetical situation: Say one group studied (with a high drinking rate and a relatively low risk of death) is aged 20-40, one group (with very high drinking rate and a fairly high risk of death) is aged 20-25, one group (with moderate drinking and a moderate risk of death) aged 30-50, and one group (with virtually no drinking and a very high risk of death) aged 60-80. A meta-analysis of these three studies that did NOT correct for age would show the results touted by TFA, but those results would be badly skewed.

It's entirely possible -- likely, even, I hope -- that this meta-analysis did in fact correct for age. But neither TFA nor the abstract addresses that question, alas. (The abstract does mention "adjusted and non-adjusted data", but isn't clear on what adjusting they did.)

I wonder if one of the errors was to selectively swap CDC and NIH (which oversees the CDC's budget) in particular this director seems to match your description. http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/historical/direct ors.htm#varmus

The two, of course, are related to rise in population and cutting milk consumption will not prevent crime.

Actually, Alexander Schauss's research on the diets of juvenile criminals found that delinquents drank excessive amounts of milk, crowding frutis and vegetables out of the diet; and substituting orange juice or water resulted in a decrease in antisocial behavior. (Unfortunately I don't have a link; it's work from the 1980s, mentioned in passing in one of my dead trees books: "The Healing Arts", Kaptchuk and Croucher.)

No, the studies I listed compared violent crime statistics in areas with certain gun control laws and without. There is nothing fuzzy about that and they are not addressing some subset, like the number of minors killed.

I was referring to the slashdot comment that you indicated was "evidence". Hence the reason why my comments, 1 - 3, were below the relevant text.

What good would such a study do? Can you magically make people not own guns? Obviously not. You can pass legislation to restrict or ban guns, and that is exactly what was studied in relation to violent crime.

You are being willfully ignorant. Gun laws can be enforced like any other laws (e.g., tax law) and moreso than many others since one usually needs to buy, store, practice, and use them at some point. The effectiveness of the laws may vary greatly though depending on: how long they've been in existence for; the severity of the penalties; the methods of enforcement; and on the particular laws (including the framework of law that supports it, e.g., right of the police to search). The variability of laws and their effectiveness is all the more reason why we should look for alternate measures, especially those that compare the prevalence of what we are trying to regulate. As it happens, we do have fairly reliable data on gun ownership rates (based on anonymous surveys, purchasing data, and other sources). Anyone with an ounce of sense would appreciate that this is a far superior measure for quantitative studies than attempting to compare laws.

Furthermore, there are numerous studies comparing gun ownership rates to gun-related suicidies and homicides and they are very tightly and robustly correlated. I don't think even you would try to refute this. Although you might argue that more gun deaths don't mean more deaths in general, it certainly is a very good indication that our gun ownership data is, in fact, pretty damn accurate.

Actually, while the inverse is not true, the lack of correlation across a statistically significant number of sample studies does indicate that their is a negligible probability of a causative relationship.

Sigh. Are you really this much of an intellectual light-weight? All a statistically insignificant degree of correlation means is that that single test does not prove a relationship. Perhaps if all the scientists have studied the matter extensively, questioned all their assumptions and looked at their numbers, you might conclude that there is probably not relationship, but this is NOT the case here. Even a test that is 100% statistically sound is not necessarily good science.

Do you believe in global warming? Global temperatures between 1940 and 1970 fell by 0.2 degree Celsius while annual average fossil fuel consumption increased to roughly 4 billion metric tonnes of carbon. Any study conducted around this period would either show no correlation or a negative correlation...

http://www.climatescience.org.nz/assets/2006927134 6160.GlobalWarmingLKW.pdf

First, it is factually incorrect about the level of gun ownership, which is not much different from a number of other nations.

Uh, wrong. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?a rtid=1485564&pageindex=3 The US is by far the highest in the developed world, even more so if you look at private gun ownership (instead of government/military weapons which many of the guns Switzerland are).

Second, it says that gun ownership rates to not have significant effect on crime rates. I don't see how this is supposed to refute my claim that gun control laws do not, in general, correlate to decreased violent cr

I didn't think I had to since those numbers were presented by several different people already and modded highly in this article. Here is one of the pertinent ones that is also well written http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=210866&cid =17175778 [slashdot.org]. Not one person I saw in the entire discussion presented numbers indicating that violent crime (as opposed to "gun crime") correlates favorably with gun control legislation.

Huh? Nothing he mentioned in any way contradicts anything I've said on the matter. The whole thrust of his argument was to put gun related deaths into prospective. I agree, for instance, that the average citizen is far more likely to killed by a car than by a gun. I simply believe that society would be better off if more and better gun laws were put in place (esp. those that would reduce concealed weapons, readily available/loaded weapons, etc).

Several points:

First, the data does not compare gun ownership, frequency of use, and method of use to the deaths and injuries so it tells us little about the risks on a marginal basis. By this same fuzzy rationale I might come to conclude that Russian Rulette is relatively safe because only 3 minors died of it last year (or whatever the exact # would be... certainly very small).

Second, it does not mention any study of correlation of gun ownership in general to any of the various bad things (murder, violent crime, robbery, etc).

Three, it particularly does not discuss specific gun laws as it relates to specific crimes. This is absolutely necessary to persuade me. I believe that responsible ownership of rifles is an acceptable risk generally, but that laws that allow most people to carry and own weapons that are readily concealed (including driving around with a loaded weapon at all times--handgun or not) results in a marginal increase in murders and serious injury (I do not believe that it tends to reduce crime across the board). In other words, even if one were to accept that "gun ownership does not cause an increase in violent crime" this says nothing about particular gun laws, murder rates, etc. That argument is kind of like arguing that, because we can prove that modern medicine correlates strongly with people living longer and healither lives, that any specific doctor or medicine is safe (e.g., untested medicines, unlicensed doctors, etc).

"the facts show that there is simply no correlation between gun control laws and murder or suicide rates across a wide spectrum of nations and cultures.

As for these very limited statements you've presented, I disagree with the conclusions you are drawing from them. The mere fact that someone who studied it failed prove correlation in a particular study (or even several) does not mean that there is not a causative impact. There are a lot of other variables involved and the data collection is difficult (different places measure crime and gun ownership different) whether you are comparing two different places or two different times (before and after).

What's more, there are studies that do suggest positive correlation between gun ownership rates and homicide rates...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1359-1789(03)00044-2

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2005.02.003

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11130511&dopt=Citatio n

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/abstract/148/10/172 1

While I completely agree with the parent, I wonder at the feasibility of producing biofuels on such a scale. I would love to see a super efficient production of biofuels from non-food sources.

On a slight tangent I have a real problem with the hydrogen fuel cells and even hybrids for vehicles when we can produce perfectly viable electric cars now. With the addition of new efficiencies in solar panels and personal windmills, we could conceivably make enough of our own electricity to charge our own cars.

Shit, I'm so late making this comment. But then again, Slashdot is waaaaay late posting the article.
From 2005: http://www.nih.gov/nihrecord/03_01_2005/story03.ht m

By the way, is "Human trials are a year away." your hallucination or the editor's? Even if the story didn't explictly say otherwise, no way were they getting this from such an early stage into humans in a year.