P.S. actually answering the question, from the point of view of the company I used to work for (15 years ago). When I started, we used a home-grown job/bug tracker. We transitioned to ClearCase (source control) and ClearQuest (job tracking). There was supposed to be wonderful interoperability between them, but it turned out that (at the time) this interoperability only worked in Windows, and we were a Unix shop, so I (and some others) had to cobble together some interoperability of our own. I wrote a daemon in Perl which could listen for messages on port 6502 (my first CPU) generated by scripts checking in code in ClearCase, and pass the information on to ClearQuest to populate the list of code changes belonging to the job.
I've had a meandering career which went from academia to industry programmer and back to academia. My new academic field (phylogenetics) can have a fairly high programming content, but universities don't usually have the level of organization around programming that an industrial organization does.
Shortly after I started my new job, my boss/head of lab came to me. He'd received a survey asking organizations about their programming procedures (i.e. much like this question.) Having learned about CMM (Capability Maturity Model) at my previous job, I had the perfect answer for him. "Tell them that we are a CMM level one organization".
Translated: CMM level one means everybody does whatever the heck they feel like.
They mean $1.50 per day in Iran gives you a standard of living comparable to getting $16,000 per year in USA. It was badly worded - I had to look twice to figure out what they meant.
If you are pumping it into an underground reservoir that used to hold natural gas, then you already know the reservoir can hold gas for geological time periods. (Or at least it could until someone drilled into it.)
It passed peer review in a high quality journal. While this doesn't completely rule out p-hacking, at the very least it means you shouldn't make the accusation without closely reading the paper.
One issue is comparing heritability within a group with differences between groups.
The old argument goes something like this. Within middle class white Americans, IQ is highly heritable. Black Americans and new immigrants from Eastern Europe (this is around 1910 when there were many such immigrants) score much worse than middle class white Americans on IQ tests. Because IQ is heritable, the Blacks and Eastern Europeans must be genetically inferior.
There are (at least) two major problems with this line of reasoning. One is that the tests had a cultural bias. This can be as simple as people with English as a second language not understanding the instructions, or just lack of familiarity with the types of questions being asked. Another is neglecting the contribution of environment: the testees may in fact be less intelligent, but because of impoverished childhood rather than inferior genes.
A good example of this second point is height. Height is more heritable than IQ, but is also affected by childhood nutrition. As a people become affluent, average height increases, even though the genes are not changing.
These results are from using SNP chips. To make a SNP chip, a sample of individuals from a population (in this case, humans of European descent) are sequenced, then the sequences are compared to find SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism: i.e. a place where some individuals have one DNA base and others have a different one.) Then some hundreds of thousands of those SNPs are selected (we want something like an even spread of SNPs over the genome, and we want to chose SNPs which have a fairly high degree of polymorphism - we'd rather something which was 50:50 rather than 99:1.) A SNP chip is designed which when exposed to DNA from an individual will say yes/no for each SNP. (Scanning the paper, I see two of the SNP chips they used were UK BiLEVE Axiom array and the UK Biobank Axiom array which have over 820,000 SNPs each.)
This has several consequences. One is that the SNP chip is of limited use for populations other than the one for which it was designed. Another is that seldom is the SNP on the chip directly related to the feature/quality (intelligence in this case) that we are trying to correlate with. Rather, the SNP which correlates positively with IQ is probably just nearby the genetic difference which matters. Because they are close, recombination (shuffling of the two genome copies you have, which happens in the production of gametes) is unlikely to separate them. Because they will occasionally get separated, the correlation of IQ with the SNP is going to be a little less strong than the correlation of IQ with the actual variant gene (allele). A SNP chip is less informative than a full genome sequence, but is much cheaper, and much easier to analyse.
A final point is that genome wide association studies like this have in the past been plagued with false positives. When there are so many variables being tested (hundreds of thousands of SNPs on the SNP chip) some will strongly associate with your measured quality (IQ) by chance. This is even more so if you use sophisticated analyses which look for combinations of SNPs as predictors. I will provisionally accept that they've accounted for this correctly, as I lack the expertise to judge for myself.
I work in a tangentially associated field (phylogenetics) so my knowledge has some professional basis, but is well short of that of an expert in the field.
A contract requires that both parties receive something from the other. When you buy software with an EULA, you get software and the programmer gets your money. When you use GPL software, you get software and the programmer gets ???
There are various things we could put in the place of "???", but it is not clear whether they count as being a consideration for the purpose of contract law. Defendant Hancom argued that it was clear that ??? was not a consideration so the contract claim should be summarily dismissed. By rejecting that motion, the court has not concluded that ??? is a consideration, but finds the issue non-clear-cut enough to allow plaintiff Artifex to argue that there is a consideration.
Finding that there is no contract in the GPL case would not affect EULAs, because in that case there is payment which makes it clear there is a contract
I am not a lawyer, everything I say might be wrong.
There are a number of things to unpack here. To a statistician, "significant" means "very unlikely to have happened purely by chance", i.e. we are seeing a real difference, not sampling error. To a lay person, "significant" means "big enough to matter". You are arguing that this result is not significant in the second sense.
If there are non-linearities in a system, small shifts in the mean can have a large effect. For example, a town has natural temperature range between -20C and +45C. An increase in the mean of 2C is small compared to that range. However, the number of days per year hotter than 40C might easily triple with that +2C shift in the mean (due to the shape of the high temperature tail of the distribution), and if >40C is a threshold for causing major health problems, then the small shift has a large effect.
145g might be significant in this way: a 1355g baby might have much worse survival chance than a 1500g baby. (Further complicating things, although the mean might shift by 145g, the shape of the distribution might also change. The shift could affect low weight babies more or less strongly than normal weight babies.) I don't know enough about babies to know whether that 145g shift is important or not.
Electric cars lose on the energy storage, but win on the engine. Instead of 300 kg of engine and 70 kg of fuel in a petrol car, you can have 30 kg of motor and 340 kg of battery in an electric car without increasing the mass. (Note that those masses are guesswork on my part.)
On top of that, it is hard to sell cars with 100 mile range, so electric cars dedicate more of their mass to propulsion+energy storage than fossil fuel cars.
There are many reasons why this isn't ever happening. A very big one is that such a 'battery' would be producing heat all the time. Say your device has 10W peak demand, and your radioisotope thermal generator (nuclear battery) has efficiency 10% (better than we've yet achieved), then you'd need an RTG which was emitting 100W of heat all the time. (On the plus side, it would do a fine job of heating the interior of your car on cold days.) (If your device only uses 10W occasionally, you could pair a 1W output RTG with rechargable batteries, but now all you're saving yourself is the need to plug it in each night.)
Further reasons: * Cost - even with efficiency of scale, producing radio isotopes will be very expensive * Scaling - the technology works (sort of) for 100W power generation, it may be hard to scale down to 10W or 1W * SIze - a 100W RTG is the size of a person. * Safety - they contain really nasty radioactive sources. If you use alpha emitters, you can make them 'safe' with very thin shielding, but once the material escapes into the environment (e.g. in a house fire, or someone chops the battery with an axe) it is very nasty indeed.
Yes, future technology can help somewhat with any of these - but it needs to improve all of these problems, each by many orders of magnitude, before nuclear batteries will be practical.
In case anyone was wondering: John B Goodenough: person, named 1922. Johnny B. Goode: song, released 1958. So Prof. Goodenough not only predates the Chuck Berry song, he also predates Chuck Berry (by four years.)
The five stages of name-pun reaction: 1) Amusement. This stage starts at age about 4 to 6, when the punee first gets the joke. It typically lasts about 30 minutes. 2) Tedium. This stage typically lasts a few months 3) Anger. Will you stop with that stupid joke already? 4) Bargaining. If you stop making those stupid jokes, I'll stop pummelling your ribs with a baseball bat. 5) Acceptance. Let the jokes flow through you, omnipresent yet harmless like the air. Find your inner peace. Make it your life's mission that everyone who has ever made this joke will be carrying in their pocket a chemical bomb of your design.
Demand for lithium is soaring and supply is scrabbling to keep up. If I was contemplating constructing a lithium mine/extraction facility, I would be worried that my investment might do fine for five years and then suddenly become worthless when some new battery chemistry came along. Is this fear justifiable? Is it reducing current or near-future lithium supply?
I am not now and never have been a citizen of the USA, so chalk me up to non-purposely ignorant. Reading TFA more closely, this proposed law would only apply to federally funded highways: "the dig once bill requires states to evaluate the need for broadband conduit any time they complete a highway construction project that gets federal funding." And local bodies are in on this too: "Dig once doesn't have to be just for state and federal projects, as cities such as Boston and San Francisco already require it locally."
While I'm not terribly familiar with the responsibilities of levels of US government, this seems like something appropriate to being dealt with at the local body or possibly state level. Why is the federal government involved?
Yes, the researchers give this as a major advantage of their discovery - you can give the (hypothetical future) drug without knowing which type of stroke the patient has.
I've considered that - it would take some care not to accidentally die of wrong pH blood or bad electrolite balance or somesuch. I'd also need to find the toxic dose when injected - hopefully way less, because I don't think injecting a kg is doable. I think of this goal as protection against suicide. If I am ever suicidally depressed, it will look like just too much effort to die by vitamin C overdose, so instead I'll live.
The drug is found in venom, but is not itself venomous. (Source: listening to radio interviews.) In addition, any drug is toxic in sufficient dose. (Some drugs are toxic at their therapeutic dose, such as chemotherapy. Use of such drugs requires a careful cost-benefit analysis.) I've decided that should I ever decide to commit suicide, I'm going to try to be the first person ever to die of vitamin C toxicity. It will take about a kilogram.
These results are from experiments on rats. In radio interviews, the researchers said that human (phase I) trials were at least 18 months away. I'm no expert on how long clinical trials take, but I'd expect phase I through phase III couldn't be under three years, so expect 5 + years until this is in your ambulance's medicine cabinet. Try not to have a stroke before then.
How does a burglar without bulky tools quickly, safely and inconspicuously cut power to a house? Other than the occasional low hanging fruit (meter box, with mains switch, is on exterior of the house) I can't think of a way, but IANAB, so maybe ways exist.
Many US states have "right to try" laws, and this is the sort of thing that those laws are designed to allow. On the supply side you have charlatans, well meaning doctors who have a dud treatment they truly believe in, and well meaning doctors who have a working-but-unproven treatment they truly believe in. On the demand side, you have patients who want to pay for a miracle and have bought into the (often hard-sell and deceptive) sales story of the supply side. These combine to try to push politicians into allowing unproven medical treatments. The medical establishment objects, but are often drowned out.
You can find lots of criticism of "right to try" here.
"Eradication" implies it is being done worldwide. If there is a country which doesn't do the vaccines, you don't have an eradication program (i.e. you have not overcome the political/social will problem).
Some diseases develop new strains which evade vaccination. Measles is not one of them. Influenza is an example of a disease which we cannot (with current or near term foreseeable technology) eradicate, because of fast strain evolution and animal reservoirs.
Vaccines can be used to eradicate measles, we just haven't tried.
Vaccines have eradicated smallpox and are on the verge of eradicating polio (42 paralysis cases worldwide last year, so far this year we're running at 1/3 of last year at the same time, 3 vs 9 cases.)
In terms of eradication, smallpox had everything going for it: an effective cheap vaccine, no animal reservoir, obvious symptoms, and the political/social will to make it happen (because it was such a terrible disease.) By comparison, polio can circulate without obvious symptoms, making it hard to eradicate.
Measles eradication has everything going for it that smallpox did, except for the will. People who think measles vaccines are dangerous should campaign for measles eradication. Their children will get the vaccine, but their grandchildren and every later generation until human extinction will not.
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P.S. actually answering the question, from the point of view of the company I used to work for (15 years ago).
When I started, we used a home-grown job/bug tracker. We transitioned to ClearCase (source control) and ClearQuest (job tracking). There was supposed to be wonderful interoperability between them, but it turned out that (at the time) this interoperability only worked in Windows, and we were a Unix shop, so I (and some others) had to cobble together some interoperability of our own. I wrote a daemon in Perl which could listen for messages on port 6502 (my first CPU) generated by scripts checking in code in ClearCase, and pass the information on to ClearQuest to populate the list of code changes belonging to the job.
I've had a meandering career which went from academia to industry programmer and back to academia. My new academic field (phylogenetics) can have a fairly high programming content, but universities don't usually have the level of organization around programming that an industrial organization does.
Shortly after I started my new job, my boss/head of lab came to me. He'd received a survey asking organizations about their programming procedures (i.e. much like this question.) Having learned about CMM (Capability Maturity Model) at my previous job, I had the perfect answer for him. "Tell them that we are a CMM level one organization".
Translated: CMM level one means everybody does whatever the heck they feel like.
They mean $1.50 per day in Iran gives you a standard of living comparable to getting $16,000 per year in USA. It was badly worded - I had to look twice to figure out what they meant.
If you are pumping it into an underground reservoir that used to hold natural gas, then you already know the reservoir can hold gas for geological time periods. (Or at least it could until someone drilled into it.)
It passed peer review in a high quality journal. While this doesn't completely rule out p-hacking, at the very least it means you shouldn't make the accusation without closely reading the paper.
One issue is comparing heritability within a group with differences between groups.
The old argument goes something like this. Within middle class white Americans, IQ is highly heritable. Black Americans and new immigrants from Eastern Europe (this is around 1910 when there were many such immigrants) score much worse than middle class white Americans on IQ tests. Because IQ is heritable, the Blacks and Eastern Europeans must be genetically inferior.
There are (at least) two major problems with this line of reasoning. One is that the tests had a cultural bias. This can be as simple as people with English as a second language not understanding the instructions, or just lack of familiarity with the types of questions being asked. Another is neglecting the contribution of environment: the testees may in fact be less intelligent, but because of impoverished childhood rather than inferior genes.
A good example of this second point is height. Height is more heritable than IQ, but is also affected by childhood nutrition. As a people become affluent, average height increases, even though the genes are not changing.
These results are from using SNP chips. To make a SNP chip, a sample of individuals from a population (in this case, humans of European descent) are sequenced, then the sequences are compared to find SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism: i.e. a place where some individuals have one DNA base and others have a different one.) Then some hundreds of thousands of those SNPs are selected (we want something like an even spread of SNPs over the genome, and we want to chose SNPs which have a fairly high degree of polymorphism - we'd rather something which was 50:50 rather than 99:1.) A SNP chip is designed which when exposed to DNA from an individual will say yes/no for each SNP. (Scanning the paper, I see two of the SNP chips they used were UK BiLEVE Axiom array and the UK Biobank Axiom array which have over 820,000 SNPs each.)
This has several consequences. One is that the SNP chip is of limited use for populations other than the one for which it was designed. Another is that seldom is the SNP on the chip directly related to the feature/quality (intelligence in this case) that we are trying to correlate with. Rather, the SNP which correlates positively with IQ is probably just nearby the genetic difference which matters. Because they are close, recombination (shuffling of the two genome copies you have, which happens in the production of gametes) is unlikely to separate them. Because they will occasionally get separated, the correlation of IQ with the SNP is going to be a little less strong than the correlation of IQ with the actual variant gene (allele). A SNP chip is less informative than a full genome sequence, but is much cheaper, and much easier to analyse.
A final point is that genome wide association studies like this have in the past been plagued with false positives. When there are so many variables being tested (hundreds of thousands of SNPs on the SNP chip) some will strongly associate with your measured quality (IQ) by chance. This is even more so if you use sophisticated analyses which look for combinations of SNPs as predictors. I will provisionally accept that they've accounted for this correctly, as I lack the expertise to judge for myself.
I work in a tangentially associated field (phylogenetics) so my knowledge has some professional basis, but is well short of that of an expert in the field.
A contract requires that both parties receive something from the other. When you buy software with an EULA, you get software and the programmer gets your money. When you use GPL software, you get software and the programmer gets ???
There are various things we could put in the place of "???", but it is not clear whether they count as being a consideration for the purpose of contract law. Defendant Hancom argued that it was clear that ??? was not a consideration so the contract claim should be summarily dismissed. By rejecting that motion, the court has not concluded that ??? is a consideration, but finds the issue non-clear-cut enough to allow plaintiff Artifex to argue that there is a consideration.
Finding that there is no contract in the GPL case would not affect EULAs, because in that case there is payment which makes it clear there is a contract
I am not a lawyer, everything I say might be wrong.
There are a number of things to unpack here.
To a statistician, "significant" means "very unlikely to have happened purely by chance", i.e. we are seeing a real difference, not sampling error. To a lay person, "significant" means "big enough to matter". You are arguing that this result is not significant in the second sense.
If there are non-linearities in a system, small shifts in the mean can have a large effect. For example, a town has natural temperature range between -20C and +45C. An increase in the mean of 2C is small compared to that range. However, the number of days per year hotter than 40C might easily triple with that +2C shift in the mean (due to the shape of the high temperature tail of the distribution), and if >40C is a threshold for causing major health problems, then the small shift has a large effect.
145g might be significant in this way: a 1355g baby might have much worse survival chance than a 1500g baby. (Further complicating things, although the mean might shift by 145g, the shape of the distribution might also change. The shift could affect low weight babies more or less strongly than normal weight babies.) I don't know enough about babies to know whether that 145g shift is important or not.
I point out the chronology. The interpretation is up to you.
Electric cars lose on the energy storage, but win on the engine. Instead of 300 kg of engine and 70 kg of fuel in a petrol car, you can have 30 kg of motor and 340 kg of battery in an electric car without increasing the mass. (Note that those masses are guesswork on my part.)
On top of that, it is hard to sell cars with 100 mile range, so electric cars dedicate more of their mass to propulsion+energy storage than fossil fuel cars.
There are many reasons why this isn't ever happening. A very big one is that such a 'battery' would be producing heat all the time. Say your device has 10W peak demand, and your radioisotope thermal generator (nuclear battery) has efficiency 10% (better than we've yet achieved), then you'd need an RTG which was emitting 100W of heat all the time. (On the plus side, it would do a fine job of heating the interior of your car on cold days.) (If your device only uses 10W occasionally, you could pair a 1W output RTG with rechargable batteries, but now all you're saving yourself is the need to plug it in each night.)
Further reasons:
* Cost - even with efficiency of scale, producing radio isotopes will be very expensive
* Scaling - the technology works (sort of) for 100W power generation, it may be hard to scale down to 10W or 1W
* SIze - a 100W RTG is the size of a person.
* Safety - they contain really nasty radioactive sources. If you use alpha emitters, you can make them 'safe' with very thin shielding, but once the material escapes into the environment (e.g. in a house fire, or someone chops the battery with an axe) it is very nasty indeed.
Yes, future technology can help somewhat with any of these - but it needs to improve all of these problems, each by many orders of magnitude, before nuclear batteries will be practical.
In case anyone was wondering:
John B Goodenough: person, named 1922.
Johnny B. Goode: song, released 1958.
So Prof. Goodenough not only predates the Chuck Berry song, he also predates Chuck Berry (by four years.)
The five stages of name-pun reaction:
1) Amusement. This stage starts at age about 4 to 6, when the punee first gets the joke. It typically lasts about 30 minutes.
2) Tedium. This stage typically lasts a few months
3) Anger. Will you stop with that stupid joke already?
4) Bargaining. If you stop making those stupid jokes, I'll stop pummelling your ribs with a baseball bat.
5) Acceptance. Let the jokes flow through you, omnipresent yet harmless like the air. Find your inner peace. Make it your life's mission that everyone who has ever made this joke will be carrying in their pocket a chemical bomb of your design.
Demand for lithium is soaring and supply is scrabbling to keep up. If I was contemplating constructing a lithium mine/extraction facility, I would be worried that my investment might do fine for five years and then suddenly become worthless when some new battery chemistry came along. Is this fear justifiable? Is it reducing current or near-future lithium supply?
I am not now and never have been a citizen of the USA, so chalk me up to non-purposely ignorant.
Reading TFA more closely, this proposed law would only apply to federally funded highways: "the dig once bill requires states to evaluate the need for broadband conduit any time they complete a highway construction project that gets federal funding."
And local bodies are in on this too: "Dig once doesn't have to be just for state and federal projects, as cities such as Boston and San Francisco already require it locally."
While I'm not terribly familiar with the responsibilities of levels of US government, this seems like something appropriate to being dealt with at the local body or possibly state level. Why is the federal government involved?
Yes, the researchers give this as a major advantage of their discovery - you can give the (hypothetical future) drug without knowing which type of stroke the patient has.
I've considered that - it would take some care not to accidentally die of wrong pH blood or bad electrolite balance or somesuch. I'd also need to find the toxic dose when injected - hopefully way less, because I don't think injecting a kg is doable.
I think of this goal as protection against suicide. If I am ever suicidally depressed, it will look like just too much effort to die by vitamin C overdose, so instead I'll live.
The drug is found in venom, but is not itself venomous. (Source: listening to radio interviews.)
In addition, any drug is toxic in sufficient dose. (Some drugs are toxic at their therapeutic dose, such as chemotherapy. Use of such drugs requires a careful cost-benefit analysis.)
I've decided that should I ever decide to commit suicide, I'm going to try to be the first person ever to die of vitamin C toxicity. It will take about a kilogram.
These results are from experiments on rats. In radio interviews, the researchers said that human (phase I) trials were at least 18 months away. I'm no expert on how long clinical trials take, but I'd expect phase I through phase III couldn't be under three years, so expect 5 + years until this is in your ambulance's medicine cabinet.
Try not to have a stroke before then.
How does a burglar without bulky tools quickly, safely and inconspicuously cut power to a house? Other than the occasional low hanging fruit (meter box, with mains switch, is on exterior of the house) I can't think of a way, but IANAB, so maybe ways exist.
Many US states have "right to try" laws, and this is the sort of thing that those laws are designed to allow.
On the supply side you have charlatans, well meaning doctors who have a dud treatment they truly believe in, and well meaning doctors who have a working-but-unproven treatment they truly believe in. On the demand side, you have patients who want to pay for a miracle and have bought into the (often hard-sell and deceptive) sales story of the supply side. These combine to try to push politicians into allowing unproven medical treatments. The medical establishment objects, but are often drowned out.
You can find lots of criticism of "right to try" here.
"Eradication" implies it is being done worldwide. If there is a country which doesn't do the vaccines, you don't have an eradication program (i.e. you have not overcome the political/social will problem).
Some diseases develop new strains which evade vaccination. Measles is not one of them. Influenza is an example of a disease which we cannot (with current or near term foreseeable technology) eradicate, because of fast strain evolution and animal reservoirs.
Vaccines can be used to eradicate measles, we just haven't tried.
Vaccines have eradicated smallpox and are on the verge of eradicating polio (42 paralysis cases worldwide last year, so far this year we're running at 1/3 of last year at the same time, 3 vs 9 cases.)
In terms of eradication, smallpox had everything going for it: an effective cheap vaccine, no animal reservoir, obvious symptoms, and the political/social will to make it happen (because it was such a terrible disease.) By comparison, polio can circulate without obvious symptoms, making it hard to eradicate.
Measles eradication has everything going for it that smallpox did, except for the will. People who think measles vaccines are dangerous should campaign for measles eradication. Their children will get the vaccine, but their grandchildren and every later generation until human extinction will not.