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Here you go:
Fast Particle-based Visual Simulation of Ice Melting
Dynamics of melting and stability of ice 1h: Molecular-dynamics simulations of the SPC/E model of water
Alcohol-water mixtures revisited

Now go find me a fucking peer-reviewed article that says AGW means a higher probability of storms, or go play somewhere else. Peer-review: it's how science works.

Officially, we're not cattle. So when did making a buck off me start to take precedence over everything in the Bill of Rights?

That's not just a figure of speech. As the (great?)grandparent comment says, it's about impressions. There's plenty of evidence (1, 2, 3, for instance) that ads have the most effect on behavior when you're not paying attention. So the only way for me to stop manipulation of my own mind is not to have those ads in the background in the first place.

But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions. Which is even weirder because, I'm told, the free market depends on informed consumers making free choices.

Let's face it. Advertisers are gunning for a world where our eyelids are propped open with matchsticks while we watch whatever we're told to watch.

For comparison texting is much worse, and distraction and fatigue produce similar results. We could have the computer on a car detect impairment based on driver response however. But that too raises questions.

It is the mechanization problem that has been one of the economic factors behind drug criminalization for the better part of a century, besides, of course, the prison-industrial complex being profitable and being a good place to warehouse psychopaths and feed into common racism and fear of crime.

There's some speculation with asteroids, but the evolutionary concepts are testable and have been verified. In environments prone to frequent catastrophes (e.g. wild fire), only the rapid colonizing species have enough time to get a foothold. In very stable environments, the competitive exclusion principle ensures a monoculture for each niche. Biodiversity is thus optimized in environments that are somewhere in-between.

Taken to an extreme, if the Earth didn't have mass extinctions every 27 million years, then we'd probably have a grey goo scenario. Without mass extinctions the most effective species of bacteria would monopolize nearly 100% of the resources, as the tiniest advantage would ensure eventual extinction of lesser competitors. Or, if macroscopic animals are easier to conceptualize, mammals would have never taken over for dinosaurs, who would have never taken over for the pelycosaurs and amphibians of the Permian age, who would have never taken over for the giant insects of the carboniferous, and so on.

Commenting Anon to avoid undoing moderation.

Your correct about the training being the issue. Training and handling aspects are going to be very important when deciding if the dog and handler are 'doing their job'. The evidence for various breeds of canine having sufficiently developed nasal senses and intelligence to be trained is hard to refute. From centuries of hunting and tracking dogs as anecdotal evidence, to the long recognized work of bloodhounds for tracking people on the run ( including a well demonstrated mythbusters episode ), through to the scientifically analyzed work in medical testing and other more rigorous modern study. I have seen plenty of scientific evidence regarding the efficacy of dogs to smell several kinds of cancer and other assorted chemicals. A selection of Citations to show I'm not talking out my ass, and exonerate the humble canines sense of smell. One, Two, Three, Four,Five,Six.

Now the issue is clearly not the dog itself. Its the handlers. Handlers are fallible humans who need to be tested with a specific animal. If a handler over time trains his dog to signal at the wrong times, its the handlers fault, unfortunately it can be very hard to un-train this behavior and thus the animal is now a less effective tool for the job it was trained for, and the employee either needs to be reprimanded or given other duties. The application of an external performance pressure to the task, the handler 'wanting to find', is the root cause of the issue. Dogs cant be reliably used when their handlers get bonuses, prestige, or any kind of incentive that could bias the handler.

The short version of this is that organizations using sniffer dogs are clearly degrading the effectiveness of their sniffer dogs based on poor management practices either implicitly or explicitly encouraging the handlers to skew the behavior of the dog.

An example I can recall of good management (may not be an 100% correct recitation, since I heard it some years ago) is that the Australian Customs & Border Protection Services have a required level of accuracy, not exceeding thresholds set for both false negatives and false positives during training and on the job. Keep pulling over the wrong guy, you might loose the job. And they also have a degree of separation between the dog handlers and the people that do baggage inspections and other security tasks, a dog handler is primarily a dog handler, his job is to handle the dog as part of a team.

Depends- I've known some six month olds unrelated to me that can carry on amazing conversations in American Sign Language. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/imhj.20286/abstract;jsessionid=39A4775805DA752A88B78DF6DCFEDAFA.d01t02?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+on+27+October+from+10%3A00-12%3A00+BST+(05%3A00-07%3A00+EDT)+for+essential+maintenance

I think this, like the assumption that people in the past were stupid, is a bad assumption.

I’ll be driving the author of that article next week to the annual WWII glider pilot’s reunion. It was called snatch pickup or “the snatch”. About 1-in-8 WWII gliders were launched this way: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA516653 The tow plane’s winch grew out of airmail pickup in the Alleghenies, with the goal posts first used by the Marines in 1927 (there’s a display at the National Museum of the Marine Corps). The physics of a 1946 launch of a 25,000-lb cargo glider into flight: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-3584.2009.00190.x/abstract A towed variation retreived telemetry tapes off tracking ships after rocket shots in the 1950’s, and a mid-air version caught spy satellite film. Today only aerial-towed banners are picked up this way.

Goalposts moved!

Alrighty then. This report conducts an analysis that includes manufacturing the vehicle itself. I've givem my opinion of the report and the overall conclusion is EVs are still a winning proposition.

specifically the batteries that use some very nasty chemicals, and toxic elements

More nonsense. All production EVs available now use some form of lithium chemistry. Lithium "mining" is comparatively benign with most of the lithium supply coming from salt flats where the brine is pumped to the surface and allowed to evaporate until the salt you want starts to precipitate out. The electrodes are usually carbon and/or aluminum and the electrolyte - while not something I'd want to be drinking - is typically a volatile organic compound and poses virtually no long-term environmental risk. You must be thinking of nickel batteries. No production EVs I'm aware of use Nickel batteries.

And they have to be replaced

So do engines and transmissions, or at least they need a major overhaul. And like traditional automotive parts, batteries are extremely recyclable.

Least you think you'd need to replace the battery every year or whatever, the standard warranty is equivalent to any other drive train warranty. Even the most pessimistic estimates place the estimated service life of an EV battery at 8+ years (level of abuse notwithstanding). So the issue of cost is moot. Battery packs are also serviceable, in that being highly modular you can replace individual cell sets if that's all that's wrong with it.

Not saying this is still not better

That's pretty much what you were implying, though, wasn't it?

Everyone calls them "zero emission vehicles"

The vehicle itself produces no emissions. "Zero emissions" is actually a legal definition. I seriously doubt any EV owners, much less EV advocates is there are any non-advocate owners, are under any delusion that their vehicle has zero cradle-to-grave environmental impact. Owners of gasoline powered vehicles, however, seem completely unaware - sometimes deliberately so - of the true environmental costs of their chosen mode of transport.
=Smidge=

Besides, there are so many to choose from.

John Wiley & Sons are cunts. Anyone who buys their books is a cunt. Don't be a cunt.

If you have any of their books that you want to resell, maybe you should give them a call. Ask them if they will send their cunt lawyers after you when you put the books on eBay.

10475 Crosspoint Blvd.
Indianapolis, IN 46256
Phone: (877) 762-2974
Fax: (800) 597-3299
Web: http://support.wiley.com/

According to figure 1 in the study.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-9290.2012.00532.x/full#f1

The environmental impact of the battery production is more about other factors than energy used. From the figure freshwater eco-toxicity (FETP), mineral resource depletion (MDP), human toxicity (HTP), and terrestrial acidification (TAP) are the largest impact items from battery production. So maybe a little too much attention is being put on the energy use, which is represented by global warming (GWP) and is a relatively small part of the production "impact".

From the article:

Considering how the potential problem shifts mostly arise from material requirements of EV production, effective recycling programs and improved EV lifetimes would constitute an appropriate first response.

This is the conclusion I came to. Most of the impact is not energy use, but other environmental factors, which can be addressed.

A meta study, hidden behind a paywall.

The published paper appears to account for this effect. I only skimmed it, because it's beer-thirty.

Here is the abstract from the work done in Leipzig. Also if you happen to have access to Wiley Online Library or Wiley InterScience you can read the full publication here, I don't so I am not sure if that gets you all the way there or not.

My links didn't seem to format properly, so here they are in un-edited format : http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=13671279 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2003.tb01876.x/abstract

These both clearly show social facilitation for cognitive tasks, with effects that increase as the task is complexified.

The article you put forth, by the way, doesn't support your initial postulate that the Ringelmann effect "means" the group cannot perform better than the sum of its parts. They did not disprove in any way the Köhler effect. They merely were not able to say that the variation was statistically significant. This is very interesting (particularly given that the second study, concerning word associations, indicates a decrease in performance in almost all group situations), but I can't find a follow-up work. Usually, this is the sign that there was a parameter that was unaccounted for and after correcting the structure of the experiment the results were "as expected", or merely that upon repeating the experiment they observed the expected outcome. Furthermore, I can't seem to find the paper you are putting forth in its full form, nor in a journal. The work in question seems to have been presented at two working groups (the EAESP General meeting 2005 and the Jena Social Psychology Task Group 2005), and then quite suddely vanished. The University hasn't kept the presentations (the wayback machine has archived them, but the links on the university's own page are dead : http://epb.uni-hamburg.de/de/node/3703 ), Dr Nina Plum now works as a consultant, and I can't find Gabriele Engelhardt on either the university's website nor an open search. Dr. Witte has retired, but only in 2011, and after 2005 there does not seem to be any collaboration between any of the three authors to deepen the elements presented in this research.

This isn't an attempt at character assassination, but I feel you're engaging in what would pass for irrational behaviour in conspiracy circles. Evidence that goes your way is necessarily true, despite being incomplete, not peer reviewed, nor having been followed-up, whereas evidence that suggests the opposite is "wrong" despite meeting all these criteria.

FYI, some forms of female circumcision are less drastic than male circumcisions. From the World Health Organization's page on female circumcision:

Type IV — All other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, for example: pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization.

Some of of the other types outlined by the WHO are also less drastic than you describe.

See a longer comparison of male and female circumcision here. Another interesting note from a peer-reviewed article:

There is in fact evidence that female circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection in women (Stallings and Karugendo 2005), but given Western cultural preferences it is unlikely that there will ever be clinical trials to test and confirm the possibility.

It's the same sort of factors that are being used as reasons to increase rates of male circumcision in Africa.

Why does having a vaccination "stress [your] son's immune system out" more than his routine everyday exposure to hundreds of potential pathogens, such as those on your skin or in his crib?

There's a good review here of the development of the human immune system both pre- and post-natal. It's entirely possible that the difference in immune function between young children and adults is an adaptive trait, given that most classes of pathogen will be encountered in the first few months of life. Your baby might look fragile, but he's had T-cells since he was a 12-week old fetus.

I think the reality is that no matter how much we armchair pontificate, there are people who have PhD's in this stuff and have spent the last 40 years of their life thinking about it, working on it, and sharing ideas with those who are in a similar field.

Except that that is irrelevant. The methods of science can be understood by a layman -- and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If a quantum physicist told me "hey, I just discovered a new particle that is going to end the world tomorrow, trust me", I'd still hold that opinion with a degree of incredulity, despite him being an expert in his field. This is especially true when you take into account confirmation bias, which happens to actually be more likely within focused slices of the populace moreso than in the general populace. For example, there's plenty of peer-reviewed scientific papers in the pharmaceutical business but that doesn't stop selection bias from occurring: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sim.4780130518/abstract

like I'd get pissed off if some climatologist heard something on TV and started lecturing me on the inaccuracies of the work I'm doing because there's no chance he'll understand all the nuances without years of work in the subject

I doubt you make such grand claims in your field. The environmental finding are being scrutinized more heavily specifically because of the grandiosity of the claims.

And I don't think it's too unreasonable to predict the next 100 years given the past 100 years.

Really? Name any field we can do that in. Hell, in just the past 20 years, we've seen computers leap from less than a megabyte of storage to several terabytes. We've gone from 200 baud modems to multi gigabit ethernet connections. Could you have predicted the emergence and popularity of the internet 30 years ago? Based on the trends of the previous 30 years? How about economics? Human beings are _awful_ at predicting the future. We see patterns where we want to see them.

My point specifically was about creating a save zone for the off-spring which is quite common accross all mammals and is often also directed against male sexual aggression.

http://www.mendeley.com/research/functional-aspects-of-maternal-aggression-in-mammals/

To the extend that it is established that human children can suffer from depictions of violence this is an extension of this principle.

And yes, the detrimental impact on children by violence depicted in visual media is well established as illustrated by the various references that I already included in the other comment:

http://www.apa.org/research/action/protect.aspx

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2003/03/media-violence.aspx

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1986.tb00246.x/abstract

http://mediasmarts.ca/backgrounder/kids-net-seven-and-eight-year-olds

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/pr040527.cfm

Oh my! You are a father?

And you don't even bother with a quick search to double check if maybe your initial statements might be false.

Two minutes of web search:

http://www.apa.org/research/action/protect.aspx

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2003/03/media-violence.aspx

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1986.tb00246.x/abstract

http://mediasmarts.ca/backgrounder/kids-net-seven-and-eight-year-olds

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/pr040527.cfm

BTW I am not concerned about simple nudity or a normal sex act, it is very specifically the mixture of aggression and sex that is most concerning. That is why I repeatedly cited "Fisting" and "Ball Torture".

Your comment has certainly ruined my day and is very depressing. I originally chalked this nonsense up to teenage immaturity. If you are in fact a parent and yet so proudly display your ignorance on this topic, then this is disturbing on many levels.

And yes, you are also entirely wrong about learning. You are essentially negating decades of neurological, psychological, AI and educational research. The key here is how category learning works and the path towards more abstract thought processes.

Don't think though that any of this will penetrate you pre-conceived notion.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3403200097.html

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1641285

http://web.cs.dal.ca/~sraza/papers/Malay_journal.pdf

Good point. I just gave the first link I found.

Here are three peer reviewed studies. Had I spent more than 2 minutes with Google Scholar, I could have found more.

I do stress that this is emerging evidence, and a lot more work needs to be done. But even if there's no link found, the simple fact is that porn is not information about sex, it's misinformation about sex.

Of course this only works if you trust those who control it.

Also in the 1970s these same climatologists were claiming that the ice age was right around the corner.

I'm old enough to remember the 1970s, and I call bullshit. I'm not saying there might not have been some paper published in the 70s predicting an ice age, but I just did a literature search for the decade and found lots of papers predicting AGW and none predicting an ice age. If we presume such papers probably existed, the ratio of AGW to ice age papers had to be something like 20:1 or greater.

*In fact*, there are a number of papers from the mid 1950s discussing AGW, like this 1955 paper, from which I'll quote:

The extra CO2 released into the atmosphere by industrial processes and other human activities may have caused the temperature rise during the present century. In contrast with other theories of climate, the CO2 theory predicts that this warming trend will continue, at least for several centuries.

So this notion that AGW was something ginned up by political liberals in the 1980s to funnel money to their scientist friends is a lie. The AGW hypothesis originated during the Eisenhower Administration.

You didn't even bother the check, did you? You just *repeated* propaganda as if it were fact, even though it'd take only five minutes with Google to determine that it was total BS. This is exactly the problem the climate scientists are talking about. So many people are too lazy to check facts or think for themselves that a liar with a big pot of money is unbeatable in the court of public opinion.

But every year the Hurricane people have said that there would be X hurricanes this year; yet nearly every year they were very wrong.

I call bullshit again. Let's look at the last five years of data, shall we?

2011: In May NOAA predicts 6-10 hurricanes. Actual number: 7
2010: In May NOAA predicts 8-14 hurricanes. Actual number: 12.
2009: In May NOAA predicts 4-7 hurricanes. Actual number: 6.
2008: In May NOAA predicts 6-9 hurricanes. Actual number:8
2007: In May NOAA predicts 7-10 hurricanes. Actual number: 6

So NOAA's numerical predictions over the last five years are correct 80% of the time. They missed just once, but just by a hair. Their predictions of the character of the season (active or quite, number of major hurricanes) is remarkably good, considering that they're talking about weather six months in advance.

Again it took me less than five minutes to check your facts for you. If you can't be bothered to do that, you should STFU.

To put that in perspective, Dr. Paul Pharoah, a cancer researcher at the University of Cambridge said in a statement the results would mean an increase in lifetime risk of intracranial meningioma in the U.K. from 15 out of every 10,000 people to 22 in 10,000 people.

I have scanned the original paper http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.26625/abstract as well, and it is not very impressive as to its use of statistics. This AC in the thread gets the statistics right with respect to the original paper: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2777187&cid=39634199

But back to Dr. Paul Pharaoh's claim and correct use of Poisson statistics. When using Poisson statistics, the sample size is the number of positive events not the total population under study, in this case the 15 people with meningioma. One standard deviation is Sqrt[sample], so rounding to 4. This means that for any group of 10,000 people, there is a 68% chance that the number with meningioma is between 11 and 19. Similarly for that 22/10,0000 estimate, one standard deviation is Sqrt[22] ~ 4.6. For any 10,000 people in that group the odd are 68% that there will be between 17 and 26 people with meningioma. So we can see that there is overlap between the two expectations. From the 15 number to the 22 is about 1.8 sigma, and while 1.8 sigma hints at a result no self respecting physicist would publish that as a result; they would want to get at least three sigma certainty. And this report is no where near 3 sigma.
You state your claim of a 46% increase with a certainty that is not supported by the statistics. In some cohorts of 10,000 it is 46%, but in about the same number of cohorts it is 0%
A recent editorial in Nature comments on directly on sloppy use of statistics in cancer research: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483509a.html

improper use of statistics — the failure to understand the difference between technical replicates and independent experiments, for example.

It is relevant to the paper and our discussion.

For in-depth discussion on my above work I recommend my favorite statistics book, which has good coverage of the use of Poisson statistics: An Introduction to Error Analysis by John Taylor ; http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Error-Analysis-Uncertainties-Measurements/dp/093570275X - suitable even for a Frosh E&AS major.
* It is possible that clever use of Baysian statistics could push the sigma of the origial paper past 2, but I'd be surprised if they could get to 3.

Actual article for the journal Cancer referred to by the OP's news site is here as a pdf:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.26625/pdf

Read it yourself-- not outlandish and makes a good case for the methodology used.

Also, I encourage you to look at other studies that are related as I think you might be interested. For example, the following says nothing about whether radiation in bite-wing x-rays is dangerous, rather it explores the question "what is the most effective technique for patient treatment" (my wording not theirs):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22103270

Research is a good thing. Research applied is a very good thing. Results of research ignored because "this is how we do it" and "it's really not dangerous anyway you silly scardy cat" is a very sad and potentially dangerous thing. Note-- not directed at jd, this is just my observation (okay, frustration) of how it sometimes "is" in the real world.

Here is the study itself. Ignore the media, they're obviously idiots.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.26625/abstract

There are too many variables left untouched. The only reason this is getting attention is because it's from an Ivy.

Are these digital radiographs (formal term for "x-ray")? Are these older film radiographs? What other sources of radiation are these people exposed to? What were their settings for each capture? Is it confirmed and documented? Are they travelers?

Obviously exposure to ionizing radiation is bad. No one is arguing that. However, in terms of damage, you just threw a pebble at a canoe in the water.

A radiograph from a general dentist, be it bite-wing or periapical is about 1/2 the daily background radiation exposure per shot.

Panorex (the thing you bite down and another thing goes around your head... most common when you see an oral surgeon to get third molars removed or an ortho / perio / prostho) is obviously more radiation exposure. While it is a fairly centralized beam, there still is scatter as it moves around your head.

Then if you see an orthodontist, you'll probably get something called a lateral cephalogram which is even more with a larger exposure target (includes brain).

In the dental community, there is a LOT of skepticism and unanswered questions.

Oh since this is /. here is a obligatory XKCD - http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Given the chart I linked and it's relative accuracy, these people would probably blame a Sinal CT on Kennedy getting shot.

Here are a handful, there are lots:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1750946710000498
http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/31/3/264.short
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1985.tb01641.x/abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1310767/

And so on. The list goes on and on really, there are literally hundreds of studies on IQ and how to improve it. IQ scores as a metric of pure cognitive ability divorced from education is just fundamentally debunked, and actually has been for some time.

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.

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.

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.

I think you have it for life if you have aquired it, but for type 2 diabetes, loosing weight (and exercising) is the primary treatment, and according to the widely used Norwegian Electronic Doctor's Manual (NEL) almost all cases can be prevented by preventing obesity (: They reference an article here, amongst others, for this claim. The goals of therapy is stated to be to reduce the condition to a non-symptomatic one if possible, and this is what weight loss and exercise seems to achieve (but medicines might also help, and acute cases needs medical intervention).

Regarding weight loss as treatment, I'm not sure if this resource is available for free everywhere, but it's also clearly stated here and here. Wikipedia also references an article on this.

That's of course not to mention all those other things that a healthy diet and working out does for your body. Seems like an attractive package for just about everyone (:

sexual activity doesn't significantly impact your cancer risk

Not true.

Even if the results would have been published a year ago, exposure to options like this are preserved only to people participating in studies until the therapy is approved and established. This takes some 3-5 years at least. Also keep in mind that newer things are by far not always better. Btw., here is another interesting article regarding this topic showing that there is a lot of space to work in this direction: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-6143.2012.03992.x/abstract

I doubt they really mean it in the way we think they mean it.

What do you think nerve repair means? If you think it means using very tiny thread to suture the nerve sheath, while being careful not to suture the inner portion, then that's exactly what it means. The nerve itself will knit on its own. It's been done for a long time. You can find surgical manuals from the 30s that document proper nerve suture techniques. The first documented nerve suture was performed in 600 AD (though I can't find reference to the effectiveness of it). Microsurgery techniques have made great strides since then. And I believe that the major nerves will be in a larger bundle for an above-elbow arm transplant compared with a hand transplant, so this situation is actually easier than the hand transplant cases (though peripheral nerves are another story altogether). At any rate, nerves also regrow all on their own, though for an arm it can take 2-3 years of slow progress. There have been several above-elbow arm transplants that resulted (after 2 years recovery) in full elbow mobility, limited but useful sensation, and extension and flexing of fingers and thumb. (Citation for one such transplant, full article may be behind paywall).

The problem with nerve regrowth in transplants is that sometimes they just don't, though in 2009 French doctors discovered that they can trigger regrowth by manual stimulation of the motor cortex using magnetic impulses. The theory being that nerves that aren't being used by the brain anymore won't regrow, so if the amputation was not recent, the nerves won't grow without a jump start straight to the brain.

Above elbow/knee transplants can also have the problem that that much vascular bone marrow greatly increases the chance of graft-versus-host. Though apparently it can also lead to the opposite result, with the host accepting the graft tissue more readily.

Marian B. Pour-El found that even linear systems can have non-computable properties. See "The Wave Equation with Computable Initial Data Whose Unique Solution Is Nowhere Computable", Marian B. Pour-El, Ning Zhong, example link, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/malq.19970430406/abstract

Obviously there's a huge gap between NP-hard and non-computable.

On the other hand, one cannot even take it for granted that the Halting problem is not decidable. Toby Cubitt and colleagues probably assume a certain amount of metaphysics. I imagine they only claim NP-hardness as opposed to NP-completeness because they have no NP algorithm to show?

S

Not really true as it depends on where you live. Sinusitis is caused by the same respiratory tract pathogens that cause other respiratory tract infections, such as pneumonia, although the majority are viral and self-limiting. Most microbiology labs know the relative rates of infection with specific organisms and the levels of resistance to various antibiotics. Hence, where I work, the common organisms are H. influenzae, S. pneumoniae and M. catarrhalis, for which over 80% are sensitive to amoxicillin or doxycycline. Adding in a bit of beta-lactamase inhibition with co-amoxiclav doesn't really help. My opinion, for simple acute sinusitis, is that there's no benefit in antibiotics. They may shorten the duration of illness, but at the risk of antibiotic side-effects, which are more common than people think. This is backed up by Cochrane. Don't you just love Evidence Based Medicine!

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

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

The fact that there was someone there to look at the formation of the plume means that it is not entirely unexpected, as in "someone got their project funded, and thus made a reasonable case for it".

Of course this would be found/discussed in fairly technical papers. If you trust journalists to do science reporting right, I have a bridge on the Moon to sell.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0924796395000062 for example dates from 16 years ago.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1034/j.1600-0889.2001.530504.x/abstract is from 11
  years ago and directly related. Hint: sciencedirect or google scholar are a better way to get scientific information/papers than plain google.

I've never seen an undergraduate textbook that costs more than $200.

Then you haven't been looking, or are full of shit (most likely both).
Here's a standard undergrad calculus book which lists for more than $200.
Here's a standard undergrad chemistry book which lists for more than $200.

And there are plenty more. This is pretty typical for the big "service" courses for freshman/sophomores in college. It doesn't matter if a student is lucky enough to find a cheap copy somewhere; the fact is that the publishers are ripping off students with expensive new editions that add little to no value over previous editions, at outrageous list prices (often the same price at campus bookstores).

(Also, I believe this is most likely the study that the Daily Mail article references, not that I have sufficient access to check it for certain, and like most newspapers they don't exactly include a bibliography.)

FWIW, I believe this is the study cited in the Daily Mail article, but it's outside of my institutional access.

That has nothing to do with the fact that it is illegal to use as a recreational drug, for the very good reason that long term use produces brain damage.

Strawman. The danger of recreational use has nothing to do with the legal impediments of using drugs in a clinical setting, which this whole thread is about, ie. ideological impediments to scientific progress. Research of this sort was delayed for years for political reasons.

Finally, the latest studies found no meaningful cognitive differences between MDMA and non-MDMA users, and indeed, there are serious concerns with previous studies on the subject. Which raises another impediment to progress: research driven by ideological agendas.

OCEAN ACIDIFICATION

... is a terrible misnomer. If anything it is dealkylation, but the ocean swings through larger pH changes over the course of the day than are predicted with the worse case doom and gloom fairy tales.

If you can get past the paywall, I suggest you have a look at this:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02583.x/abstract

That list describes addictive potential. It's saying that it's physiologically harder to quit nicotine than heroin. Neither of them have withdrawal symptoms which can kill you, despite what the movies might suggest (alcohol is another thing however - quitting that can kill you). Withdrawal aside, both nicotine and heroin have an LD50 (a dose at which it will kill 50 people in 100) - nicotine has an LD50 of around 0.5-10 mg/kg; morphine has an LD50 of around 400mg/kg (heroin metabolizes into morphine in the bloodstream within about 2 minutes - they're functionally equivalent from this perspective). Probably more importantly, nicotine kills around 1 in 2 of long term users (http://www.who.int/tobacco/health_priority/en/), heroin kills around 1 in 13 (eg http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1360-0443.1999.9422216.x/abstract). If someone tols me I had to start using heroin or tobacco tomorrow, if all I cared about was length of life I'd choose heroin.

Again, you have clearly no idea what you're talking about. I'd advise you to stop blustering and get more than a Masters level education in statistics.

Nowhere does the article claim that calibration is "twisting the data" or "changing the data". It quite clearly says that calibration is changing the values of variables used in the model: "Calibrating a complex model for which parameters can't be directly measured usually involves taking historical data, and, enlisting various computational techniques, adjusting the parameters so that the model would have 'predicted' that historical data."

What the article is describing is fitting a model: finding parameter values that cause it to fit the data.

"Calibration" is a commonly used statistics term in some sub-disciplines. (Others call it "fitting", "tuning", or "parameter estimation".) It literally means "fitting the model", or in a Bayesian context, computing a posterior distribution over the model parameters (e.g., this discussion).

It is simply false that a model which validates well on out-of-sample data will necessarily predict well. The article is in fact about circumstances under which this assumption does NOT hold, such as in statistically non-identifiable models.

One way in which this can happen is if your likelihood surface (or, more generally, objective function or error metric) is multimodal. It can easily happen that both your training data and validation data identify the same mode, but the true value ends up being a different mode, and you can only find that out farther into the future.

To understand better what the article is talking about, you may want to read this paper, which I suspect is by the same guy cited in TFA.

And yes, I do build statistical models for a living. Pretty much everything I do on a daily basis is model calibration. I am not a card-carrying statistician myself (i.e. my Ph.D. is not in statistics), but I'm trained in the field, all of my research is in statistics, I collaborate regularly with statisticians, and publish research in statistics journals.

Many of you are completely missing the point, compounded by anyone criticizing Ron Paul's economics by saying it's "stupid" has utterly no understanding of economics. Net, We in the US have two choices: take a good deal of pain now (slash government expenditures - and departments), or take apocalyptic pain later. That really is the basis of the choice. I'm going to go through this pretty fast, so try to keep up.

This is the best presentation I've found that really characterizes where the US and world economy is right now. One of the worlds smartest hedge fund managers giving you a real education of the state of the world. It's really a brilliant video: Kyle Bass @ AmeriCatalyst 2010 | 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWgtzwqWh60

The economics are sound despite the 3rd grade level retorts I've read on this thread. There is clear empirical data demonstrating that the money multiplier effect from government spending and lack thereof (expenditure cuts) that support Ron Paul's plan -support data follows:
"The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks," by Christina Romer and David Romer. Working Paper version.
"An empirical characterization of the dynamic effects of changes in government spending and taxes on output", by Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2002. Online version dated July 1999.
"What are the Effects of Fiscal Policy Shocks?" by Andrew Mountford and Harald Uhlig. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 2009. Earlier Working Paper version (no charge).
Here's a higher level view for those that don't want to get into the minutiae of the data and want a MTV education of economics: Watch this:Fear the Boom and Bust then this: Fight of the Century
Then the tired argument that Ron Paul wants a gold standard is just not right: Go look at his campaign page then read this: A Free-Market Monetary System http://mises.org/daily/3204
It's really surprising really, because technology and Internet people like us should really be the most capable of understanding the Austrian economic ideas. It's a complex self organizing system like the Internet. Hayek's absolutely beautiful essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" captures it perfectly: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

So, when exactly did this change occur? Obviously it had to be before the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 1988. Certainly long before Science magazine published Barrett and Gast's article titled Climate Change back in 1971, I assume. Probably even before the publication of Gilbert Plass's study The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change back in 1956.

Please, enlighten us. When did this "name change" occur to avoid all of this ridicule?

Although you can't get to the paywalled article, there is a barely legible chart, which shows the specific capacity, in mAh/g, to be ~2200. Current Li-Ion batteries, which use a graphite based anode, have a specific capacity of ~350 mAh/g. So 2200/350= ~6 times the capacity.