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Happily my access does cover it (link for anyone else who wants to try).

The statistics look...mediocre. There's enough there, I think, to make it an interesting avenue for research, but it's definitely not a 'urine test for autism' (to be fair, the paper doesn't claim that, the blog and the summary exaggerate it).

What differences there are are pretty minor, and only some of them are apparently significant between the autistic children and their siblings (as opposed to the unrelated controls). I'm not altogether happy that some of the controls are from a different location, although they have found that there is no significant difference between the two control subgroups, but it's still a bit dodgy. They're also using statistical methods I don't know ("Projection to latent structure discriminant analysis"). Finally, I don't see any evidence that they've done corrections for multiple tests, although some of their results are P < 0.001, which would probably withstand that.

All in all, it strikes me as a case of the Science News Cycle.

Disclaimer: I am a biologist, but in a very different field.

I think you'll find that most of the mistrust people harbour about scientists, and science in general, comes from the fact that the media tends to 'definitively' interpret the results of non-definitive studies. Or over-report studies that, when peer-reviewed, fall apart like a... well, like a poorly-built motorcycle.

As in, like this?

So you mean they chose MBA students to test the applicability of a device for students' use? They should have considered using real graduate students instead. As a grad student myself, I can say that the only way I would consider a kindle or ipad for my own use is if someone gave it to me for free...

It doesn't matter if it were MBA students or MS/Ph.d EE students since they were testing for usability in the classroom. Probably the study originally focused on MBAs hoping that a positive mark would lead to adoption as a (future) corporate tool.

I sadly reached the same conclusion after buying my Kindle 2 last year. It is excellent for pleasure reading, but horrible for studying. When studying you need to fast-flip through the book, and when doing research, you need to scan dozens of pages at a time to get a sense of structure before zooming in into key areas. None of that is possible with the Kindle.

Let's just say that, given I do very little pleasure reading, but a lot of technical reading, studying and researching (combined with its sub-par support for PDF documents), my Kindle 2 has been the worst investment I've ever made in electronics. I don't think I've ever bought anything that proved to be so useless for the task I intended to use (partly my fault for not doing enough research on this thing.)

In fact, based on my experience with the Kindle ergonomics, it cannot be done with a keypad. You need to go full touch screen with the ability to flip pages as fast as possible... AND (unlike the kindle) with the ability to see really large chunks of text (as close as possible with the original printed versions.)

The iPad (or something similar to it) would pave the way to electronic readers with the ergonomics necessary for studying and researching. The Kindle is really good for pleasure reading, it is really nice. But that's it. And I cannot imagine anyone wanting to pay $489 for it considering that for a few more bucks you can get an iPad (which with its touch screen could prove more suitable for the type of text reading and scanning required for studying and researching.)

I mean, really, I could understand in 2009, but now, who would in his/her right mind pay that much for a Kindle? Amazon is pretty much stuck with spoiled goods on this one.

So you mean they chose MBA students to test the applicability of a device for students' use? They should have considered using real graduate students instead.

Franzi Roesner is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/franzi/

So you mean they chose MBA students to test the applicability of a device for students' use? They should have considered using real graduate students instead. As a grad student myself, I can say that the only way I would consider a kindle or ipad for my own use is if someone gave it to me for free...

> I have a problem with "medical surveys" in that they a prone to make correlation-causation errors.
No they aren't. The people who conduct medical surveys such as this are invariably qualified epidemiologists who don't need to be told the difference between correlation and causation by some guy on slashdot.

Now, the media reporting of such surveys quite often conflates correlation and causation; see:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

The final stage, not illustrated in the above diagram, involves some guy on slashdot conflating the actual surveys with media coverage of said surveys.

Quick overview of the history here and here.

Quick overview of the history here and here.

Wow, way to read into my post, dude.

Something most Slashdotters probably know is that science journalism is very derivative. Since a lot of journalists don't know squat about science, most of them just end up regurgitating stuff. Sometimes random irrelevant facts are added, sometimes important information is stripped out. Mentioning that both hearts are from sows without mentioning why seems strange. There could be a reason why, or it could have just been an extraneous fact that was included..

Now, the sentence from TFA ("Thatte and his group harvested two female pig hearts and placed them in two different containers.") is very similar to a sentence in a cited source here ("The researchers harvested hearts from female pigs, stored them in one of the two solutions, then biopsied them at several points over the next four hours.") Was there an original story somewhere that said why sow hearts were preferable, or was it just a random detail that someone added without context? Unfortunately, I can't access what appears to be the original paper at the moment to find out either way.

I have been paid to work in a research lab. I have also been paid to work for a newspaper. The interaction between science and the media fascinates me. And in my experience, there's a lot of truth to this comic.

Why would the gender of the heart donors matter?

The question is, why wouldn't it? Do you know? I don't.

Yeah, I'm hoping for a response from someone who does know. Thanks for making gross, incorrect assumptions about me, though.

Yeah, though it's a common problem that reporting on science is overblown and inaccurate. Scientists make subtle claims, and reporters will simplify and exaggerate them. Whether this is through ignorance, a desire to make things more palatable for their readers, or a desire to make the article more punchy and widely circulated, I cannot say, though the further it goes through the news cycle, the worse it gets. This is a large reason why people don't trust science: when you oversell your case, people can tell.

Relevant comic:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Because, judged by spending, the influence of the "scientific-technological elite" is so small by comparison to the total amount of defense spending. While the potential for a similar sort of feedback certainly does exist and the warning therefore should be taken seriously, things haven't headed in that direction.

Now, if he warned about an entertainment/media elite too, he might have been onto something.

Scientists don't write newspapers, journalists do.

Exactly and journalists have an agenda of making people pay as much attention to them as possible.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Obligatory PhD comic

This is a cool variation on a basic idea that's been used before, and will make a great payload for cancer treatment. However, killing cancer cells is not all that difficult; rather targeting cancer cells is hard. It's all about the therapeutic index, i.e. the ratio of damage done to cancer cells against damage done to healthy tissue.

Talking about cancer as "a disease" is a big misnomer; at best it's a huge family of diseases (really nice explanation in this comic). Patterns do emerge -- certain tissues tend to have similar patterns of gene expression between people and therefore tend to give rise to similar cancers -- but each cancer that arises comes about in a different way, and evolves in response to different selective pressures within the body. The biggest of these pressures are fairly obvious like the need for neutrients (so "successful" cancers are the ones that evolve the ability to encourage blood vessels to grow around them) and evading the immune system. So, almost by definition, the outside of a cancer cell is forced to look as similar as possible to the outside or a healthy cell in the same tissue, to avoid detection.

There are some exploitable internal differences. Most cancers (but by no means all, or even close to all) express hTERT, a gene responsible for repairing the telomeres, whose degradation would otherwise limit the cells' replication. So some researchers (including my former lab) are working on techniques to exploit that e.g. viruses that can only kill cells expressing hTERT. The downside is that some legitimate cells also express hTERT, most notably your stem cells (bone marrow, some other tissues).

Another popular method is just targeting all cells that are highly metabolically active. Cancer cells tend to be working unusually hard (most cells in your body just sit there gently ticking over most of the time), so some cancer therapies target any cells that are burning through a lot of glucose (e.g. radiolabelled glucose is used as a source for imaging techniques like Positron Emission Tomography) or that are doing a lot of DNA replication as part of cell division. Again, though, this targets many cells in your body which are working this hard as a normal part of their programmes.

So, yeah, this is a cool payload but targeting is the hard part. If we knew what ligands to tie these particles to for targeting and how to persuade these huge particles to move against a pressure gradient and through a dense, disorganised extra-cellular matrix, cancers wouldn't be half the problem that they actually are. We could be using targeted viruses (piece of piss to do if you know what you're targeting and the surrounding tissue isn't too dense), metal nanoparticles, targeted liposomes (little hollow balls of fat) containing toxins or toxin precursors, modified antibodies to alert the immune system to the cancer cells, etc, etc.

Curing a cancer would be pretty easy: throw enough researchers and resources at one patient's specific tumour and we'll come up with a damn fine treatment. But curing all cancers -- different tumours arising from different tissues in different patients -- is seriously hard. We'll see fantastic advances in treating specific cancer types, but I seriously doubt that "a cure for cancer" is possible within our lifetimes. Although, heh, if you prove me wrong I won't be too upset :).

I don't believe the similarity of this:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1187
Click on the next ones to see the whole story

Homeopathy doesn't (generally) claim that the small amount of the substance creates the cure, but that it's the dilution itself of that substance that helps.

Go read the wikipedia link in my original post - you've just described one of two schools of thought about homeopathy.

don't try to claim that it "trigger[s] an immune response"

Oh I don't make that claim, that's made by European (mostly) pharmaceutical firms.

Ever gotten stung by a bee or an ant? How did your body respond to the pain, itching and swelling induced by the venom? What's that? Your body fought those symptoms off, and you recovered? (Assuming you're not of the rare type who die from insect venoms.)

Ever wondered if that same principle can be applied to conditions with similar symptoms? One homeopathic remedy uses dilute quantities of bee venom to, get this, reduce itching and swelling caused by autoimmune hives.

Additional uses are for the reduction of chronic pain and arthritic joint inflammation. There are also claims that it reduces the symptoms of multiple schlerosis. While I've not found a peer-reviewed study about the latter (yet), there are two American university who are studying the pain/inflammation angle.

Homeopathy is based on wild guesswork and superstition

Funny, it sounds like your knowledge of homeopathy is based on the same. Why don't you open your mind and do some reading beyond news stories which confirm your biases? It's plain you and others here have never researched homeopathy beyond what you already believe.

News that we see.
One day we will see ... Staring at an LCD screen causes baldness.

In general until that point, it's still worth it to fund their education just for the work they do as a grad student, and the likely work they will do in the US afterwards, even if a few end up going home and working and contributing heavily in another economy.

Speaking as a grad student, it's not like we're paid that much, less than unemployment on average apparently. Cheaper in many cases than hiring a non-grad student to do the same work. The lab gets cheap labor, and the student gets an education. Even if those students don't stay, I expect it adds up to a net benefit for us.

Here's where I think the main problem actually is: We actually send home some who do want to stay.

I absolutely agree. The NSF, DARPA, NIH, etc.. have paid for the education of many a foreign grad student, only to have them booted out of the country after they finish their degree. (A lot of them end up moving to Canada.)

Some of the grad students I knew had to do some crazy things like leave the country periodically, and then apply to get let back in, just because that's what the bureaucracy required.

The F-1 Process Explained

So you object to the blantant misrepresentation of scientific facts by mass-media journalists lacking the necessary education to understand the issue they're writing about?

Welcome to the club, active since... well, one hell of a long time. Read this and this for a rough idea on how modern journalism really works.

Bring:

Also:

Your American birth certificate, your proof of owning land/houses/structures in the US or UK, proof of any hotel reservations that you may have made, letters of guaranty from as many British citizens as you can, your proof that you are not Muslim, your proof that you are white, your 27B/6...

Researchers don't much care about recognition on /.. They're getting a Nature publication out of this so you can bet that they're fairly happy with the exposure it's getting. Although from the looks of it, it's not that uncommon for that group, damn impressive publication record. Nano, nano, nano; they've got the right buzzword to collect high-profile publications anyway.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=13

Especially when we arrest the arabic man who was just nervous about introducing his girlfriend to his parents.

The sad part is that our society probably won't care much until we realize that it is even causing problems for people who are of western descent. Take a look at some of the latest PHD comics:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Come on people, get pissed off at this already!

Especially when we arrest the arabic man who was just nervous about introducing his girlfriend to his parents.

The sad part is that our society probably won't care much until we realize that it is even causing problems for people who are of western descent. Take a look at some of the latest PHD comics:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Come on people, get pissed off at this already!

Especially when we arrest the arabic man who was just nervous about introducing his girlfriend to his parents.

The sad part is that our society probably won't care much until we realize that it is even causing problems for people who are of western descent. Take a look at some of the latest PHD comics:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Come on people, get pissed off at this already!

Sort of. There is a meaningful statistical correlation behind subscores in IQ tests, and despite the existence and appeal of the multiple intelligences model, the data still tends to support the general intelligence factor model.

And while it's true that no one is good (or even experienced) at literally everything, people who learn one subject earlier and/or faster have far more time to devote to learning additional proficiencies later on. This is also disregarding the role of overlapping thoughts and ideas, which may greatly hasten learning a new subject. In other words, the more you know, the easier it becomes to know even more (as an added bonus, broad knowledge has also been found to aid creativity, presumably because you have more analogies to draw upon and apply in different places). And the faster you learn, the quicker you'll know a lot (assuming you have the dedication). One of my ideas has served as a magnet for such polymathic types - I've easily spoken to hundreds by now - and the vast majority of them are in fact gifted.

My impression from all of this is that you could have particular proficiency in a single subject that doesn't reflect on an IQ test - but general (or at least multifocal) proficiency exists and does seem to associate much more strongly with IQ.

None of this has anything to do with making good choices in life, of course. That's not usually a question of advanced reasoning ability (though it may have some relation with executive function). Plenty of people across the IQ spectrum consistently make bad choices. Like going to grad school :)

It's still interesting, but yeah, the title's misleading. See http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Whenever I see facial recognition enhancement, I think of this:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1156

Turns out... it's theoretically impossible!

Seriously, this video plays like a bad science ficition movie... they say "let us monitor everything and we'll magically know when crimes are committed," without saying exactly *how* they plan on sorting through the incredible amount of data and coming up with "crime X being committed right now" in a timely manner.

Oh, and this story made me think of this comic. Applies perfectly here.

Wow, about as insightful as the deathpanel nonsense.

First off...what? Research isn't driven by insurance companies, so I'm having a hard time understanding how that would remove incentives of any type. With nationalized healthcare are people going to still have heart attacks? Yes. Are people going to pay a lot of money for this to recover from a heart attack? Yes. Are people going to fund research like this? Obviously. I'm not seeing anything to suggest that our health insurance industry is responsible for any innovation besides the new ways of denying coverage they find. I realize I'm not an expert in the insurance field, so I'm willing to listen to your evidence as to how researchers in Israel (which APPEARS TO HAVE NATIONALIZED HEALTHCARE) are funded by our healthcare system.

You seem to be suffering from the notion that the only reason researchers, doctors, and scientists come up with stuff is to make a boatload of money. That's absurd. That is a motivating factor for some researchers. Definitely not all, and definitely not most. Maybe that's why most medical doctors get into the biz, but as a scientist currently earning less than I would on unemployment... no. Just no. Even if it weren't for the money, there'd still be the accolades (beyond /. of course), the respect, the research grants, the good feeling that comes from coming up with something that saves lives, and the satisfaction that comes from discovery, to drive them on.

Hell, I'm a grad student, so I am proof the accolades, money, respect, grants, and good feelings of any type are even dispensable: some of us do it because we're masochists.

Why is that a worrying signal?

Because people go to the US mostly for the "branding" that was built over the last century: however, for what I have seen, conditions and opportunities are better elsewhere. One of the latest strips of PhD comics poked fun at graduate stipends being at about $18k/y. In Norway (got my PhD there) you get about 50, overall taxes at about 25%. This is bad for you because you are already losing the best candidates to Europe (except for excellence universities like Ivy league), and there are no US candidates to take their place. The immigration procedures at various airports never stroke me as particularly friendly, either.

Last but not least: a lot of research is defence-funded. Some do not have problems with that, but Einstein would not have accepted that. Guess where the next Einstein will look for a position?

It's American, not USian.

I'll tell you a secret: America goes from Canada to Argentina. The US are not America, whatever your language's customs may be. I was specifically restricting my focus to the US using an unusual word to avoid implying that non-US Americans do not already have to learn language at school (Canadian English speakers must learn French, all others have to learn English).

That's not necessarily a good thing for science.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1200
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1201

These cartoons really help to know where the work and the money goes.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1200
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1201

These cartoons really help to know where the work and the money goes.

Recent comic in PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) comics touched on this:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1200

And here's your webcomic reference: PhD Comics

Stuff on tv has always lacked rigor ;)

If tv science was like real science...

Columbus also dazzled Ferdinand and Isabella with graphs and fancy (incorrect) math showing that the world was half as big as it actually is. You can see documentation of this technique here: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=41

do you think that once, just once, an article could mention error bars? Please? This comic pretty much summarizes how much I trust articles like this: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Then I read about how bad it is for your heart. So I cut it out dramatically. Then a couple years later, I read about how it isn't very bad at all...

In that case the problem isn't really the science, the problem is panic and making drastic decisions based on limited information.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

It might be interesting to read the original report, because the Washington Post article is Silly Science at its best (or maybe worst).

The "three groups" is especially silly, because near the end, they describe it as the result of a split 70,000 years ago (the main exodus from Africa), followed by a second split 40,000 years ago (European vs. Asian). This isn't three groups, it's a three-level tree, with a two-way split in the trunk followed by a two-way split in one branch. If you were to look at more levels of the tree (say, Asian vs. Polynesian or Amerindian), you'd get more than three groups.

And, of course, the other top-level branch is "African", which is actually the base of the tree of human clades. It has been understood for some time that most of the genetic variance in humans is within Africa, with European and Asian branches several levels from the top. There are several other "groups" in Africa that are higher-level splits than the Eurasion split of 70,000 years ago.

I'd be tempted to guess that the "three groups" idea was made up by the Post's writers, who probably can't count much higher. They also probably don't have any concept of a genetic tree. Possibly the researchers made a few comments about these two major splits, and the writers took it to be something terribly significant.

And it's mode much more complex when you consider that below the species level, you never have a strict tree. All those subspecies/variety/race splits can and do interbreed, so within a species, the tree structure can never be much more than a rough approximation. But this is probably too much complexity for a journalist. And it just might be a major part of the explanation for much of the homogeneity that they write about.

There was a good comment on how science journalism works in today's PHD Comics. It seems like a direct comment on this Washington Post article.

Yep, I haven't read the research, but my first reaction is that the summary is an oversimplification and seems outright wrong. I start with the assumption that this is what's happening, and then wait to read the actual research before making up my mind.

Maybe the'll add a comment section too.

Then people can express how they feel about your NPOV.

PHD Comics had a great take on how science reporting works.

Obligatory PHD Comics reference: If TV Science was more like REAL Science.

You guys should check this out, it is so true.

Yes. And that is the case ALL the time. We need special hats or something to protect us.

-FL

Colossal magnetoresistance in manganites are discovered some 15+ years ago.
And this field is so hot in recently years that tons of papers come out every month. In fact I did my masters thesis just on this particular topic.
You guys should check this out, it is so true.

Most people here seem to think that the BPA in bottles and linings is harmful. I work in a lab that tests the low-dose exposure effects of BPA on mice. I personally drink from cans lined with BPA-laden plastics all the time, because the dose-response curves I've seen indicate that the risk of harm from BPA is negligible.

There are plenty of other estrogenic compounds that you all consume in much higher quantities, so if you care about your BPA intake, you are misinformed. I'd like to thank the science news cycle for that.