Slashdot Mirror

The odds of my being killed by a gun have almost no relationship to whether I own one myself.

Actually, they do. People with guns in the home are around twice as likely to be murdered and 10 times as likely do die of suicide as people without guns (source). People carrying guns are about 5 times as likely to get shot as people who aren't carying guns (source). This is not even considering accidental shootings. You say you're "not the sort of idiot who is likely enough to shoot myself by accident," and I hope you're right, but I doubt many accidental shooters thought they were either.

How many of those are gang-bangers who have guns in the home?

When those "studies" control for gang membership in the family and race, they'll have some numbers to believe. The largest single most largest risk factor in the US for dying by violence is being a young black male. When that factor is controlled out, the numbers will be able to speak about what people who are not young black males should be concerned about for guns. (The article says no such thing BTW, so their numbers are flawed.)

When you measure old white guy with a good job and guns the numbers will come out very different. The risk factor from a segment of the gun "owners" comes from a vastly different source than the gun.

The odds of my being killed by a gun have almost no relationship to whether I own one myself.

Actually, they do. People with guns in the home are around twice as likely to be murdered and 10 times as likely do die of suicide as people without guns (source). People carrying guns are about 5 times as likely to get shot as people who aren't carying guns (source). This is not even considering accidental shootings. You say you're "not the sort of idiot who is likely enough to shoot myself by accident," and I hope you're right, but I doubt many accidental shooters thought they were either.

Resisting an armed assailant increases our odds of getting hurt. Isn't that obvious?
Is there some "guns stop bullets" message I haven't heard of, because this all looks like a straw man from here.

The odds of my being killed by a gun have almost no relationship to whether I own one myself.

Actually, they do. People with guns in the home are around twice as likely to be murdered and 10 times as likely do die of suicide as people without guns (source). People carrying guns are about 5 times as likely to get shot as people who aren't carying guns (source). This is not even considering accidental shootings. You say you're "not the sort of idiot who is likely enough to shoot myself by accident," and I hope you're right, but I doubt many accidental shooters thought they were either.

Take a glance at page 3.

It's stupid shit like this that makes people keep thinking radiation is some form of magic.

I might as well call radiation therapy devices like tomotherapy "giant cancer-fighting plastic donuts", or refer to brachytherapy seeds as "Curative metal rice grains".

Radiation is a highly effective type of poison. Just like certain poisons, radiation sometimes causes cancer, and like other poisons, sometimes it cures cancer.

To put an article like "patch cures cancer" on a "news for nerds" website and have the punchline be that it's just topical brachytherapy is pathetic.

An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African Populations

Here you go:

"Conclusions: Smoking was associated with structural, material as well as perceived dimensions of socioeconomic disadvantage. "

http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/3/262.full

And before you say it, here's one focused on the US instead of the EU:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/american-smokers-and-income-charted/

"Yes, chlorophyl absorbs blue and some red, and reflects green"

WRONG.

http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/4/684.full

And that one link right there blows the rest of your argument away.

Actually, you are not that wrong about a Priority mail envelope. Researcher can now compress genomes to very small sizes. Small enough to fit an email attachment :
http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/2/274

At any rate, this is early on in the program. Nobody is making new hearts just yet. Cancer certainly is an issue but only one of many potential problems.

The abstract in case anybody cares. The real article is behind the usual paywall. Grrr.

I believe I may have misremembered what I believe was a WHO paper on this.
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/39/4/1064.full - for example - gives the figure as 20* more risky for anal than vaginal sex - 30* with the figures given seems entirely plausible for a study to have found, and for me to have remembered.

A friend of mine works in radiology research. He holds the same opinion.

I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Okay, if you prefer:

http://radiology.rsna.org/content/259/1/6.extract
http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/145/1/75
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/171/12/1129
http://www.propublica.org/article/scientists-cast-doubt-on-tsa-tests-of-full-body-scanners
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0267364908000708

Find me similar articles from professionals in the relevant fields and not associated with the TSA that say the opposite.

Here's the paper.

And to ruin all of the surprise: it's believed to be about a billion years removed from other known protists. That's about the same age as multicellular life. Archaea are more distant from us than these protists.

This is more baseless conjecture than anything, but its blend of unusual genes most likely suggests that it is the sole (optimized) survivor of a larger ecosystem of similar strains, which may have exchanged DNA through some horizontal gene transfer mechanism in the past. The relatedness to a distant organism in Tibet implies that at least one of these species was once geographically ubiquitous, or spread through some other means, and may have blended into its surroundings there.

The measurement of the organism's "age" is based on the sequence of an extremely conserved gene that codes for a part of a very important cell component, the ribosome. That measurement reflects how many times the sequence has been altered since it last matched a suspected common ancestor with its nearest relatives. The researchers never said that it's been essentially the same organism for a billion years (although it looks that way in the summary and MSNBC article); since they only analysed live samples, not fossilized ones, there's no way of knowing (and I'd be sceptical about any claims that said we could sequence billion-year-old DNA.) At any rate, analytical genomics shows us that for the sequence to stay the same for so long, the environment would have to be completely static and the genes very specifically optimised, which was almost certainly not the case due to historical climate trends. The rate of sequence change is very reliable on a large scale.

Those are excellent links. Working my way through them. That's the sort of data that can be sensibly used to make a rational decision on whether the dental X-Ray issue is significant or not (and if significant, to what degree). Agreed that research and applied research are good. Agreed that how things are (in terms of actual impact) vs how things are (in terms of what action people take) is incredibly frustrating and desperately sad.

Although not to do with brain cancer, the following paper (disclaimer: my uncle is one of the authors) covers genetic variations in the repair mechanism in DNA and the impact this has on cancer susceptibility. It demonstrates the fragility of the linear exposure argument elsewhere (since it's safe to assume that we don't know all the genes involved, all the polymorphisms that impact repair capacity or whether all repair is equally impacted) and potentially alters the interpretation of the results in the cites you gave (we know genes are multi-role but we don't know all the roles of all the genes).

http://hmg.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/12/1399.short

Not to mention that there are estimates that about 80% of these studies cannot be reproduced.

Including the BPA ones.

http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.org/content/114/1/1.full

While it's fine to be conservative when considering the impact of adding something to the food chain, we need to also consider these studies with a very jaundiced eye. The simple fact of this matter is that in the worst case scenarios, i.e. occupational exposure (workers at the actual factories that make this stuff) there is no epidemiological evidence of problems. And there is no known mechanism for the extreme low level effects that are being reported in many of these studies.

I'll try to resume some data in this message.

Vitamin D supplementation was found in years-long, randomized interventional trials, to slash cancer incidence - by, for example, 77%. ( http://www.ajcn.org/content/85/6/1586.short [ajcn.org] , http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/98/7/451.short [oxfordjournals.org] ) Even mechanisms of action are known ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076010001822 [sciencedirect.com] , http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.24762/full [wiley.com] , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20936945 [nih.gov] ), althought not all are fully understood.

Vitamin D RDA was 200 IU, which is a joke, almost the same thing as nothing. Specially if we consider the human body will produce 10.000 IU in a 15-minute tropical noon-day sun full-body exposure ( http://0101.nccdn.net/1_5/3a0/1e8/00e/Cannell-Vitamin-D-study.pdf [nccdn.net] The FDA was faced with this new Vitamin D pleiotropic effects, and given that the RDA was old and obviusly innadequate, it asked the IOM (Institute of Medicine) to review it. They dismissed a Vitamin-D -cancer connection in a completely biased, and non-scientific report, cherry picked some articles, ignored many articles. It shocked the vitamin-D research community, as this link is more than clear. ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbmr.328/full [wiley.com] , http://brn.sagepub.com/content/13/2/117 [sagepub.com] ). The committee had conflicts of interest, and deliberately suppressed the favourable studies ( http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8225367 [cambridge.org] , http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/today-the-food-and-nutrition-board-has-failed-millions-111112159.html [prnewswire.com])

It's interesting to note that people in the committee were hand-picked to have conclicts of interest and are developing vitamin D analogs (that work the same way, but are patenteable), so their best interest is to keep natural vitamin D the lowest level possible. Like Glenville Jones, from Cytachroma, developing CTAP101, a medicine to treat vitamin D insufficiency. Or Hector F. DeLuca, that has 101 patents of vitamin D analogs. Or J. Christopher Gallagher, working for GlaxoSmithKline, that develops Sirilux, a vitamin D analog to treat psoryasis. There are other to cite, but you got the point.

Links or it didn't happen.

I'll try to resume some data in this message.

Vitamin D supplementation was found in years-long, randomized interventional trials, to slash cancer incidence - by, for example, 77%. ( http://www.ajcn.org/content/85/6/1586.short , http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/98/7/451.short ) Even mechanisms of action are known ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076010001822 , http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.24762/full , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20936945 ), althought not all are fully understood.

Vitamin D RDA was 200 IU, which is a joke, almost the same thing as nothing. Specially if we consider the human body will produce 10.000 IU in a 15-minute tropical noon-day sun full-body exposure ( http://0101.nccdn.net/1_5/3a0/1e8/00e/Cannell-Vitamin-D-study.pdf
The FDA was faced with this new Vitamin D pleiotropic effects, and given that the RDA was old and obviusly innadequate, it asked the IOM (Institute of Medicine) to review it.

They dismissed a Vitamin-D -cancer connection in a completely biased, and non-scientific report, cherry picked some articles, ignored many articles. It shocked the vitamin-D research community, as this link is more than clear. ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbmr.328/full , http://brn.sagepub.com/content/13/2/117 ). The committee had conflicts of interest, and deliberately suppressed the favourable studies ( http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8225367 , http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/today-the-food-and-nutrition-board-has-failed-millions-111112159.html)

It's interesting to note that people in the committee were hand-picked to have conclicts of interest and are developing vitamin D analogs (that work the same way, but are patenteable), so their best interest is to keep natural vitamin D the lowest level possible. Like Glenville Jones, from Cytachroma, developing CTAP101, a medicine to treat vitamin D insuficiency.

Or Hector F. DeLuca, that has 101 patents of vitamin D analogs. Or J. Christopher Gallagher, working for GlaxoSmithKline, that develops Sirilux, a vitamin D analog to treat psoryasis. There are other to cite, but you got the point.

Obese men have smaller dicks: 'penile length and sperm count were lower with obesity'.

That was a quick summary of history of science, not a pop-sci article explaining nearly neutral selection. The point is your argument was based on a false premise. Evolutionary biologists have for a very long time considered slightly deleterious mutations. Here's another example.

"It was Einstein who pointed out in 1905 that microwave radiation is not ionizing, for which he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. I pointed this out 10 years ago in an editorial I wrote at the request of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, "Cellular Telephones and Cancer: How Should Science Respond?""

You can read Park's editorial at http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/3/166.full.

The chemistry of the Earth's natural cycles and environs are identifiably altered under increased carbon dioxide uptake. Carbon dioxide forms acids with constituent components of the atmosphere, soil and water. Water is chemically neutral and oxygen readily balances out to the available reactions, contributing nothing to net chemical cycles on the Earth outside of return carbon that has been out of the cycles for thousands and millions of years (see Cretaceous Period vs the logic of biofuels and green chemistry).

However, I could be fair and ignore science and the world we currently live in, on the off chance your logic needs to be looked at for those circumstances. Actually, we don't have to, as if either of those were a current issue with similar consequences (and some of the conversation regarding the hydrogen economy suggests water could become some class of risk), we actually WOULD be having that conversation. That ISN'T our actual problem right now. Anything that had a similar long term consequence would cause the scientific community the SAME CONCERN.

Unlike you, however, I've actually thrown in some genuine, peer reviewed research. Feel free to add and any ACTUAL research you might have. None of that meta-research by people with readily confirmed biases. After all, my research sources come from a variety of institutions and have been around long enough to go past peer review and enter into the realm of confirmability.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2486.1998.00164.x/full
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985cca..proc..546B
http://wwwzb.fz-juelich.de/contentenrichment/inhaltsverzeichnisse/bis2009/ISBN-0-471-72017-8.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2001/2000GB001278.shtml
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2004.00864.x/full
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1890/03-5055
ftp://ftp.imarpe.pe/Curso_Modelos/Biblio%20Arnaud%202/MEPS2008-Acidification.pdf%23page=5
http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/QwPqRGcRzQM5ffhPjAdT/full/10.1146/annurev.marine.010908.163834
http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/content/65/3/414.short

Those elements in the TSA are a fucking embarassement to both their agency and their country; that behavior should not be tolerated, and this situation can be easily remedied with heavy penalties that will act as a warning to the rest of the TSA lot that is there to loot while in uniform.

Heavy penalties, like hanging pickpockets?

http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/content/4/2/295.abstract

Findings suggest that 76% of active criminals and 89% of the most violent criminals either perceive no risk of apprehension or are incognizant of the likely punishments for their crimes.

Stop feeling so superior (and stop being so condescending to others).
Developed countries abuse antibiotics by feeding them to animals for better yields and by doctors kowtowing to worried patients with viral infections.
There are "uneducated idiots" (to use your phrase) everywhere.
As another poster pointed out, drug-resistant TB is everywhere. http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/194/4/479.full.pdf

For those interested in exactly how prevalent this sort of thing is, be aware that drug resistant TB is in almost every country in the world; it's just really bad in those particular three countries. This journal article from 2006 has maps showing the incidence rates per country.

Sorry, but your eugenics program will have to wait for another day. Drug-resistant TB is everywhere.

For those in the sciences, it seems like the trend is more that older people are more productive. Consider the fact that the average age physicists produce their nobel prize winning work is 48, or the average age at which a biomedical researcher receives his/her first R01 grant is 42.

The zipcodes are already set, and have an accepted basis for setting them. Gerrymandering zipcodes would be a lot more obvious than gerrymandering districts, which makes it harder. But of course ultimately any basis for districting can be gerrymandered, if the people don't pay attention. Zipcodes are easier to pay attention to.

The main advantage to zipcodes is that they're small in population, and lots of their population sees each other at the post office, parks, and other, private places in the area. Zipcodes are actually a lot more like the original US Congressional districts, with average population of 30,000, which is about the largest group of people that any American can really relate to directly (a large auditorium or medium arena). Everyone notices when their zipcode changes, and can relate to the other people in their zipcode. Plus there's a government office everyone understands in practically every zipcode, where people can vote, and where they can file their taxes, etc.

Also, the pest affected different areas quite differently. See this map

The Green areas should not be green. Data about mortality rates is incomplete. Large unaffected areas are a myth. http://past.oxfordjournals.org/content/211/1/3.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=loGlgExG0zZlz49#F1

This could be very interesting for HIV. There seems to be a genetic link between HIV resistance and the plague. A study of the Black Death's DNA from way back could perhaps shed more light on this phenomenon and how we can use it for potential gene therapy. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.htm http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/content/99/8/497.full

Neuroplasticity-Based Cognitive Training in Schizophrenia

Your personal anecdotal experiences don't amount to acceptable countervailing evidence that it is an unhealthy practice.

Here is a link to a recent article on the topic.

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/48/1/93.full

Please note that the increased consumption raw milk post 2005 has led to several disease outbreaks in the US.

Advocacy of the consumption of raw milk is a VERY wrong-headed position.

Really now? You could just use google and have saved me the 10 seconds to point out what I already knew what right. It does indeed promote bacterial resistance to antibiotics.

http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/content/54/3/621.short

okay.
There is this one: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10926722
This one : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19035449
This second one brings up an important point also mentioned by the_raptor to my previous post... The cancer may have occurred from the exposure to the exciters. Separating both is difficult obviously.

But you also have studies that show no correlation between high-exposure environment and cancer rate, like this one (also mentioned above) :
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/155/9/810.full
or this one :
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20570865

which is directly contradicted by this one showing totally opposite conclusions :
http://www.bfs.de/de/elektro/papiere/Stellungnahme_Naila/

So there is no unambiguous word on cancer incidence due to exposition to non-ionizing radiation. In the best case you could say the it is inconclusive. But stating that it is impossible that the exposure of non ionizing radiation, namely radiation at longer wavelength than UV, cannot cause cancer is about as false (or as true) as saying it does cause cancer without a doubt.

"The heavy users had double the rate of brain glioma compared to the non-users."

I'm curious about this.

I went to read the ones linked to from the articles in the OP and I think the summary is in fact wrong about it simply being a new interpretation of the study from last may since that was fairly far on the side of there being not much there.

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/05/16/1919224/10-Year-Cell-Phone--Cancer-Study-Is-Inconclusive

the actual paper from last may:
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/ije/press_releases/freepdf/dyq079.pdf

62% of glioma cases were regular mobile phone users and 64% of matched controls were regular mobile phone users.

the 40% claim seems to be based on a far smaller study of data collected before 2004.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21610117
I can't read it due to a paywall.

http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/content/46/2/303.short
http://www.emaxhealth.com/1506/75/34550/fda-finds-penicillin-drug-abuse-ny-farm-animals.html

Not saying that it couldn't be done but a boycott might be a bit of a problem since these are three of the biggest peer-reviewed journal publishers. Consider the following lists of journals:

Cambridge
Oxford
Sage

The transition would also be met with an extreme amount of resistance from the professors working towards tenure. If they do not publish due to the boycott then suddenly you have another problem in the system that must be addressed. For doctoral students, they suddenly run the risk of not having access to seminal articles along with the latest upcoming research. That would have a significant impact on their ability to conduct high quality research and subsequently find a job after graduation.

Sure, many of those problems could be addressed but a united front in academia, oftentimes an egotistic political train-wreck, is unlikely.

Grad students for all practical purposes live in the laboratory...if you want to call that living anyway. At a moderate rate of 60 hours a week your lab hours count will be off by a couple orders of magnitude after the 6-7 years it takes to earn a Ph.D. Even if you intended to write "undergrads" you'd be giving them short shrift. Of the dozen or so undergrad lab mates I've had in the last 15 years the majority worked for several years in the same lab and were funded under one of the professor's grants. That's far more than a few dozen hours which even the laziest undergrad I've worked with accomplished inside of two months. Hell I've worked with four high school students through an apprenticeship program and three had over 500 hours in by the time their stint in the program was over.

However as you point out TFA is not informative as to the point of the study and how it was funded. Having had some small experience with research being reported by the media the odds are pretty good that the reporter and/or editor mangled the point of the research quite badly and if one wants to know why mice were being trained to distinguish wine you'd need to read the original research paper published in Chemical Senses. The last paragraph of the introduction of scientific paper usually tells you why the researchers are doing their thing, and quoting that paragraph:

"Most naturally occurring odors are complex blends of volatile compounds. The way in which they are perceived depends upon the interactions between mixture components at the level of olfactory receptors (Derby 2000) as well as the way that component signals are processed in the olfactory bulb and olfactory cortex (Wilson and Stevenson 2003; Tabor et al. 2004). Because most of these inputs are irrelevant at any given moment, it should be more efficient to focus neural resources on a subset of the available information and ignore the rest (Luck 1998). However, to our knowledge, few papers have reported experimental evidence for selective attention in odor discrimination. In the present paper, we report behavioral evidence for selective attention in odor discrimination of mice. We found this evidence in the course of behavioral studies on the discrimination of liquor odors in mice using a Y-maze. Our initial interest was to assess if mice could discriminate different brands of liquors just by taking a sniff of them like an expert flavorist. Additionally, we also demonstrate that selective attention in the olfactory system of mice could be modified through their learning experiences."

Now as for how important and novel this is, it was published in 2008 and according to google scholar has been cited by other papers four times since. It's definitely not a huge paper but neither is it an embarrassment. If you've been doing science for more than 10 years chances are pretty good you'll have a paper with as low a citation rate as this.

As for weirdness, it pales compared to this: homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks. You can get the Ig Nobel-winning research paper here, complete with pictures of the deed. If you really want to.

As opposed to when cigarettes were illegal? Except they weren't. In your theory, the higher the taxes, the lower the smoking, but this is just another form of punishment. Empirically, if your theory were correct, European countries with high taxes on cigarettes would have low smoking rates, and yet they don't.

I did some googling on this after reading your post and this was the first hit (PDF warning). Figure 1 shows a pretty clear inverse correlation between tax rate and cigarette consumption. Other studies say the same thing. I think your error may be in that you're comparing smoking rates between countries - countries which undoubtedly have different social views of smoking. So their smoking rates are inherently different for reasons other than tax rate. Most of the studies I found which saw no decrease in smoking rates from increased taxes only found this to be the case for older smokers who already had a habit. The higher taxes were successful at deterring younger people from starting to smoke, thus lowering the overall smoking rate.

It's a fallacy to think that 100% of a tax gets passed down. If that were true, in 1946, when the top tax rate was 94%, then the government would have gotten around 94% of the money. And yet, it only got 20% of GDP or so. Check it out, these figures are easily available on the web.

It took me a while to figure out what you were trying to say because it didn't make sense. You're conflating a percentage with the amount that's passed down. OP's claim was that when the top tax rate was 94%, then only 94% of the income of top taxpayers would be passed down as extra expenses for everyone else. This works out to a lot less money than 94% of GDP. If the 94% rate applied to (say) just the top 1% of income earners who earned (say) 10% of the country's income, then their taxes would amount to just 9.4% of GDP.

The study I saw said only the father's age mattered: http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/mental/articles/2006/09/05/autism_study_finds_fathers_age_a_factor/ but a more recent study, http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/170/9/1118.abstract says that they both contribute. Early studies were complicated by examining maternal age and not controlling for paternal age, which is correlated. It appears to have since shaken out that both contribute.

In addition, one newer study suggests a U-shaped relation between paternal age and autism. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02223.x/full) Older fathers also appear to change the gender balance of the disorder, which supports the idea that a separate mechanism might be at play.

Ultimately, I believe we will discover the causes of autism, not a single cause.

The idea of playing music to plants is pretty far out there for me. But I can begin to go with it. After all, there have been a few studies that suggest plants might have more perception and intelligence than most would give them credit for. Who is to say for sure that a plant couldn't somehow perceive a sound vibration and respond to it in some manner? Very far fetched, but I wouldn't put it outside the realm of possibility.

But playing music to fruit? That doesn't make sense to me in anyway. Ripening is a well understood chemical process. One that I don't believe the fruit itself has any control over once it has been plucked from the tree. This is just a publicity stunt/marketing gimmick that worked well enough to land it a news article. Beyond that, it's just a waste of time and energy.

2.5 millennia at a minimum: http://ijlit.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/3/257.full?ijkey=rF2MI0t8NYrGuJJ&keytype=ref#p-103

and also https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pseudogene,
It is not all that clear to me that these viral DNA fragments are in fact capable of being "involved in virus creation".

Or more specifically, I have yet to see any specific evidence that they are in fact "involved in virus creation".

To be fair you seem to be advocating for the possibility, rather than the actuality.

Also I need to point out I am not a professional molecular biologist (I'm sure there is one around here somewhere), but to me the links did not seem to argue conclusively one way or the other.

The section on functional pseudogenes seems to indicate that there is still some active debate on the subject.

Many of the source articles seem to be locked behind paywalls, but a few are accessible.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1456316/?tool=pmcentrez

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1567693/?tool=pmcentrez

http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/5/654.abstract

Everybody likes to think of themselves as normal.

The US department of health defines 'moderate' drinking as 1 drink per day, and heavy drinking as anything above 2 drinks per day. http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/faqs.htm#moderateDrinking

According to a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology, only about 10% of Americans have more than 2 drinks per day. By comparison, over 35% of Americans consider themselves abstainers. More than half the population has at most one drink, if they drink at all. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/153/1/64

Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your level of alcohol consumption, this study suggests you're probably healthier than those 35% abstainers. But stop fooling yourself: you're consuming several times the normal amount of alcohol and by any reasonable definition, you are a heavy drinker.

Here is the original report: Leisure Time Spent Sitting in Relation to Total Mortality in a Prospective Cohort of US Adults

Such large sample sizes scare me. When you've got 100,000 data points, almost anything seems statistically significant.

Having a look at the abstract of the page "Leisure Time Spent Sitting in Relation to Total Mortality in a Prospective Cohort of US Adults", I am not sure about some of this... After reading that, I got more interested in it and just got the original article, though that doesn't help much, it's missing a lot of summary data, none the less...

• The results were via questionnaire, my guess is that people who believe they are more healthy, would underestimate the amount they sit, and people who don't, might overestimate it.
• 50% to 73% of the people who answered these questionnaires were "Retired/homemaker" with the mean age being 63.6 (standard deviation, 6) for me, and 61.9 (standard deviation, 6.5) for women. This was when they enrolled in the study in 1992, making them on average 77.6 for men, and 75.9 for women. For comparison look at the life expectancy data for people born in those years, this puts them firmly in the timespan where they were expected to die.
• Looking at the mean ages, there is a correlation between hours sat per day, and mean age. So those who are apart of the group who sits more, are also those who are oldest.
• On the mens side 52% to 57% are former smokers. On the womens side 48% to 60% never smoked, which might be correct for that generation but I am uncertain. Though they have corrected for this, I wonder how they corrected, and if that correction is legitimate.
• There appears to be an abnormally large amount of people who have NEVER consumed alcohol for women that's 44% to 47%, and for me that's 31% to 32%. This seems amazing of this sample, since I don't drink, and everyone points out how weird it is.
• This sample group was obtained from participants in the American Cancer Society's CPS-II Nutrition Cohort, as such the sample might over represent people worried about cancer and similar illnesses because they have higher instances of it in their family. They had people report their personal history to control for some of these things, but not their family history.

Additionally I would really need to get into their statistical method more, and get their original data, as it looks like there could be many more problems.

I would take this study, with a fuck load of salt.

Thank you for the link. Of course there's no details on how the researchers determined "physical activity" or any other evidence so I still tend to call this study BS because everyone knows 98% of statistics are made up on the spot.

FTFA:
" Time spent sitting and physical activity were queried by questionnaire on 53,440 men and 69,776 women who were disease free at enrollment. The authors identified 11,307 deaths in men and 7,923 deaths in women during the 14-year follow-up."

Out of 53,000 men, over 11,000 died within 14 yrs? Who the hell were they following, 70 yr olds? Sure no one died of, oh I don't know, old age?

This study seems to be so full of holes that it sounds like it was done by a 6th grade class, gotta say I'm pretty disappointed that the American Cancer Society put their stamp of approval on this.

read the fucking article

From the article:

Pay per View - If you would like to purchase short-term access you must have a personal account. Please sign in with your personal user name and password or register to obtain a user name and password for free. You may access this article for 1 day for US$40.00.

I hope you didn't mean that only people who have paid for access to the article have the privilege of joining the discussion. Did you mean something different? But I will grant that the abstract mentions deaths "during the 14-year follow-up".

Of course with reposts of reposts the story can get a little inaccurate...

• American Cancer Society press release
• The actual paper (if someone has a subscription to American Journal of Epidemiology Online)

So the most obvious difference is that they're talking about leisure time spent sitting.
Also, it seems that the correlation is by means of "everything else being equal" (which is ok by itself, but the reporting is screwing about that). It doesn't mean that people with regular physical activity but sitting a lot have a higher mortality rate than people with lesser physical activity but sitting less, only that for the same level of activity, people sitting more in their leisure time have a higher mortality rate.

The article doesn't, but the abstract of the actual paper says all participants (53,440 men and 69,776 women) were disease free at enrollment and the followup period was 14 years. Moreover they adjusted for smoking, body mass index, and "other factors." Too bad the full paper is behind a paywall. However the case for causation looks quite strong.

Stupid (multiple) copy-paste summaries never mention source. Hell they don't even get the title right. The article is: "Leisure Time Spent Sitting in Relation to Total Mortality in a Prospective Cohort of US Adults" with the link at Oxford Journals. Basically, they looked at men and women ages ~50-70 and found an increased rate in death for those who sat around like lumps vs those that got exercise. It looks like 20% of the men died and 10% of the women (though I don't have the values give those that answered yes/no for sitting on the questionnaire).

First off, here is a link to the abstract of the paper itself (if anyone could find a non-locked version, I'd be interested in reading).

Secondly, this study seems to have left out a lot of time from the day. Primarily, the study looks at humans who have spent greater than 6 hours per day sitting, or less than 3 hours per day sitting. What it doesn't do is discuss relevant times that were spent doing other things. For instance, suppose you sit right on the threshold. Suppose someone sits for 6 hours a day, but stands for three hours a day. I am pretty sure that still leaves 15 hours in that day. If we generously compensate for a 12 hour sleep period (far more than most folk I know), that still leaves 3 hours unaccounted for. I would assume those three hours were spent doing some combination of sitting and standing, and that the 6/3 hour marks are simply dividers as noted within the data. What I am curious about, though, is what exactly is the 'healthiest' method for spending your day. If I spend less than three hours a day sitting, that means I am spending 21 hours doing other stuff. If I sleep 12 hours, that means I get 9 hours of standing/physical activity. Have there been any studies done that discuss the health effects of 9 hours of straight standing/activity? I know that I've spent 10 hours doing hard manual labor before, and I can promise you that I did not feel healthy afterwards.

Also, is there any discussion or research being done regarding the best ways to break up these time intervals? Is it best to stand for three hours, sit for one, stand for three, sit for one, stand for three, and go to bed? Is it best to stand for 9 hours? Does it matter at all? For those of us spending 8 hours sitting at work, and possibly 1 to 2 hours commuting, that is a grand total of 9 to 10 hours a day of sitting. However, if we get up and bugger around for a 10 - 15 minute break every hour, that adds up to 150 minutes max, which is 2.5 hours. So now, if I take a 15 minute activity break every hour at work, I still am sitting more than 6 hours a day and standing less than three hours a day. So I am still screwed. And even more importantly, that kind of activity would probably show up on my review as damaging productivity. Can this be used as justification for insisting that my employer guarantees me more activity in my job, or perhaps more breaks?

This study certainly seems interesting from a relevancy point of view (despite the asinine way of presenting the results: chance of dying? come on that's ridiculous). However, there is almost no useful information that can be extracted from it that relates to the average office worker. In other words, what could I actually do to fix this other than changing jobs? From what I can tell, there is not a whole hell of a lot. All in all, it's an interesting study, but the results seem inescapably damning for modern work environments.