Yes, some people also want to use Hawkeye for some decisions in cricket, the sport that first used it. However the margin of error is far greater (approximately +- 2 inches) in cricket as the cameras have to be a lot further away due to the size of the pitch.
The other key difference in cricket is that Hawkeye is used to predict where the ball would have gone had it not hit a pad, whereas in tennis it only needs to say where the ball actually was.
Can this be applied to something useful. You know besides whether or not someone was out in a game of tennis?
Must of the technology that underlies Hawkeye was originally designed as a missile tracking system. Although personally I think sports are far more worthwhile than warfare.
All I'm saying is, if Louisiana wants to screw itself, let them. What difference does it make to a dirt farmer if he's decended from monkeys? It's just going to make him that much more depressed, and make it that much more difficult for him to get up in the morning to tend his crops. LET PEOPLE BELIEVE IN CREATIONISM. It's ok if someone doesn't want to know everything. Just because you do, and see the logic, does not mean other people do.
Do you really think it matters if people believe in creationism or evolution? Even for medics I don't think it's that important, and to be honest I don't think many people think about it that much at all beyond what is now this political debate. You can still have systematic biology with evolution if you want to.
Evolution is a red herring here. What's really important is the global warming issue, because in this case it really does matter what people believe, because this will determine both people's personal actions and the political climate in which governments will have to make real decisions soon.
I don't think it is correct to call ID a philosophical construct or to teach it in a philosophy class. I think it would be more correct to call it a political machination and teach it in a class on modern US politics.
It's also interesting sociologically and psychologically, in that it represents of what happens when an irresistible force of scientific evidence meets the immovable object of faith.
After about 18 months in L.A., you begin to understand the more
serious problems. The L.A. culture is even more disfunctional than the culture
where you lived before. It gets seriously lonely, living in Los Angeles, even though
there are people all around you.
I think that's true of every major city. It certainly is in London.
Remember all the publicity about sequencing the human genome? A lot of
taxpayers paid a lot of money for that. Then, it was revealed, that, so sorry,
the epigenome is a lot more complex, very influential, and almost completely
unknown.
To be fair, there's no way they could have known that without all the genetic work that was done. Until the sequencing was done and the number of human genes found to be much much lower than expected, there was no reason to discount the one-gene-per-function paradigm, since it does work pretty well in simpler organisms.
Every time you play a video game, you are spending time learning
about a fantasy world, when you could be learning about the real world. If you study the real world, you can discover that "anti-aging" is a HUGE
business, funded largely by people who have more money than scientific knowledge, and
hope not to die.
You're bascially right, but there is a discipline which IMO is worthwhile, and that is trying to promote successful ageing. This means learning what you can do to age with less disability and impairment, and exploring how best to use the new lifespan we're all going to have. Human lifespan is going up by two years every decade with no sign of a natural limit and we need to be trying to make those extra years as worthwhile as possible.
Yes, I know how to spell disfunctional. I just don't like that spelling, and I made my own.
An emerging problem is that we have more data than questions. So we go from the traditional approach of 'hypothesis -> data collection -> statistical test of hypothesis -> profit' to the new sort of data driven approaches that things like genome sequencing are giving us. These go more like 'data collection -> data mining -> hypothesis generation -> ???'.
The main problem with this new approach is that you get so many possible findings from these huge datasets that you need an awful lot more data and replication to be sure they aren't flukes.
Indeed. They'll do that regardless, of course. But if we teach them critical thinking instead of blind faith, and evidence instead of fairy tales, then the choice they'll make is a lot more likely to be one that has some relation to reality.
Well quite. That was kind of my point, although I don't seem to have expressed it very well.
If you do an experiment, your application of the results to the material beyond which you directly observe is a leap of faith of some kind. You might simply have had a freak result. It happens a lot. You might be able to give your level of faith a p-value, or modify it based on further experiments, but it's still faith, however well documented.
You begin to understand this if you explore the different arguments that statisticians put forward for how to draw inferences from data. None of them are right, and none of them can rely solely on axioms of mathematics, purely because of that leap from observations to inferences about the unobserved.
While I agree with you, and I understand the anti-creationist feeling, I don't think we do ourselves any favours by trying to get things banned from teaching. It doesn't go well with our claims to be open minded and objective about what we believe. Science is based heavily on faith, because there's always a gap between evidence and what we infer from it. There are always bits of evidence that don't fit our theories or models, and we have to be honest about that.
Evolution isn't as obvious as people like to claim. If it is, then why did it take until 1859 for The Origin of Species to be published, which was more than 100 years after Linneaus described the systematic nature of biology?
The best thing to do, and the best way to develop young minds is to show them all the evidence, describe to them all of the ideas, and then let them make up their own minds. It doesn't matter in any material way whether you believe in creation or evolution, what matters, at least in science lessons, is the process by which you arrive at your conclusions.
NIH: A bunch of self-serving PhDs that make policies about public health then go on to corporations that benefit from those policies. The NIH has yet to do a scientific study on weight loss. (Note: combining diet/and/ exercise in a study is not scientific, as you can't tell if it was diet or exercise that produced the result.)
That's quite a bizarre statement. The NIH does really run any studies, it's a funding body. The have an entire center dedicated to funding obesity research. Here's an example of an NIH funded diet and weight loss study.
Obviously any trial of say diet and weight loss has to involve exercise as a factor to be held constant, otherwise you never will be able to separate the effects. Having said that since we know both diet and exercise affect obesity there isn't a lot of point studying them both separately any more. What is now needed and what the NIH is currently funding a lot of are studies to find ways to actually get people to eat properly and to exercise more by making global lifestyle changes. Kind of life this one".
I can see someone fighting this on the grouns that your DNA is to be considered medical records and you are entitled to them with no exceptions.
I don't object to people knowing their genotypes. I only object to your genotype being sent to you by The Internet Genotype Company along with half truths and lies about the implications and guidelines for the $2000 per year 'supplements' that you need to buy from them to prevent your untimely death.
Is this particular genie really likely to stay in the bottle? And is it in any case defensible that knowledge of an individual's genome should ('for his own good') remain the province of an exclusive medical priesthood, rather than of the individual himself?
I don't know. It's a difficult question but as you rightly say one we'll have to deal with. But think about it like this: At the moment you could very easily get a complete blood test similar to what is routinely done for hospital admissions. They'll test maybe sodium, potassium, blood sugar, possibly white blood cell counts, and other stuff that I can't remember. Then add BMI, blood pressure, and heel ultrasound. These tests are all available now, are cheap, and will tell you far more about your present and future health than any genetic tests. But people don't routinely do it themselves, and probably wouldn't without a doctor to help them understand what any of it meant.
"Tests for disease genes" would be a problem -- but that's a strawman here. Broad sequencing, marketed as informational, is quite a different matter.
Are you sure? I just copied this from the Navigenics (one of the companies mentioned in TFA and the first one I bothered to check) website:
Navigenics Health Compass helps you understand what your genes have to say about the future of your health, and gives you action steps to take control of your health today - so you can have a healthier tomorrow.
There is also a list of specific conditions they 'test' for. The small print then points out that they don't offer medical advice, although they are certainly claiming that their product will improve your health.
The US Government Accountability Office compiled a report of genetic testing that is available here, although it's only a smallish snapshot of the current situation.
Both the positive and negative implications for widespread genetic testing are favourite subjects of Ron Zimmern and Muin Khoury, and if you're interested you'll find a lot of discussion of genetic test regulation by searching for them. There's a newspaper report of a study by Khoury here, but annoyingly I can't find the original work.
$1000 is not much money, and I'd find it interesting to have access to the data out of sheer intellectual curiosity -- and I find it offensive that anyone would find it to be their responsibility to "protect" me from doing that. What's next, "protecting" people from blowing their money on space tourism, or on visiting museums?
It's a case of balancing the risks against the rewards. Sure you might find it interesting, but a lot of people will get tests which are often meaningless medically and which they will base lifestyle or health choices on.
I'm not sure on which side of the argument I'm on at the moment, but I'm very nervous about the prospect of people selling tests for disease genes without any requirement for evidence of the disease-gene interaction, and for the correct information for the implications to be supplied to customers.
Would you like to know your SORL1 genotype? What if I told you it was possibly liked to Alzheimer's disease? What if I told you it was definitely liked to young onset Alzheimer's disease, but I was lying? Would you like your wife's genotype? How would you interpret the information? I understand the intellectual curiosity and freedom points of view but this can do harm as well as good.
A lot of commercial genetic testing is scientifically worthless, even harmful if they give you bad information about what your genetics actually means for you or your children. There needs to be some kind of regulation (regarding claims they can make, information supplied to customers, actual evidence for the disease-test relationship they claim etc), but at the moment the public health people can't agree on what form that regulation should take, so there might be a lot of this 21st century snake-oil around for a long time.
I don't know anything about California, but it could be that the government is trying to protect people from possible harms of bad and unnecessary testing.
Funny thing, I thought animal Farm was about Communism failing due to greedy bastards exploiting their comrades. That's the problem with abstract fiction like that, you can read it any way you like. Communists read Animal Farm as a defense of communism, we tend to read it as an attack on communism. Same with 1984. Both points of view are pretty meaningless anyway because both books are merely works of fiction, and their highly stretched scenarios cannot teach us anything about anything. Down and Out in Paris and London on the other hand is actually about something, and that's a damn good book.
.."long as you have a bottle of water inside" to pour into the fuel tank ("even tea," repeats this report).. With what we're currently paying for bottled water, I think you'd be better off sticking with gas.
Quite. There's no mention of any random allocation of colours, so better or more aggressive players might simply be choosing to play as red. I find this explanation far more likely.
This might then turn into a self-fulfilling finding as good experienced players start to choose red because they think there's an advantage, then suddenly there is a real difference between the colours.
Well since Lords are appointed for life what ends up happening is that the current government is watched over by the Lords appointed by the last few governments. It works pretty well. Many of the Lords appointed by the current government are seen in the House as sock puppets and don't get a lot of respect.
You can read transcripts of every Lords and Commons debate on the Hansard website. It's searchable as well. The BBC also hosts a lot of video of Commons debates.
I think the intent of the OLPC is good...
Just look at the trillions of dollars that have been flushed down the proverbial toilets of many developing and third-world countries. Certainly the intent of such aid is noble, but what has it accomplished besides distracting us from the factors that prevent real change from happening?
I know that asking such questions often makes one a pariah in the eyes of narcissists more interested in self-gratification than actually helping people who need it. But when are people going to realize that sending money or goods to countries ruled by corrupt governments only benefits the corrupt governments?
People do realise this, but it is very hard to get money to the right people, even if you can find them. Politically the World Health Organisation and the World Bank cant just ignore ministries, however corrupt they think they are. That's not to say they aren't trying.
It's also very hard to measure the successes, since we have no baseline or no indication of what would happen if there was no aid or no intervention. It's very easy to interpret our failures to completely fix problems as a failure to make any positive difference, especially since when a situation does get resolved it stops being news. You are right that good intentions plus money does not necessarily equal success, but a lot of good is done.
Since we in the West have got wealthier our perception of what is poverty has also moved upwards. Attempting to lift an entire continent out of a state it has essentially always been in is a task of unprecedented difficulty and will never be fully achieved, since our goalposts will continually move further and further away, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Having said that the OLPC project does not seem to have been very well thought out, but a lot of the ideas, especially that of empowering the children of poorer nations, are sound. It's got people thinking in the right direction, and as others have pointed out has prompted the development of similar commercial products.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, some people also want to use Hawkeye for some decisions in cricket, the sport that first used it. However the margin of error is far greater (approximately +- 2 inches) in cricket as the cameras have to be a lot further away due to the size of the pitch.
The other key difference in cricket is that Hawkeye is used to predict where the ball would have gone had it not hit a pad, whereas in tennis it only needs to say where the ball actually was.
Can this be applied to something useful. You know besides whether or not someone was out in a game of tennis?
Must of the technology that underlies Hawkeye was originally designed as a missile tracking system. Although personally I think sports are far more worthwhile than warfare.
No. They get our data, and after years of waiting we get finally get Oreo cookies. I think it's a win-win situation.
Sorry I seem to have totally missed the point of your post. It's obviously too early in the morning.
All I'm saying is, if Louisiana wants to screw itself, let them. What difference does it make to a dirt farmer if he's decended from monkeys? It's just going to make him that much more depressed, and make it that much more difficult for him to get up in the morning to tend his crops. LET PEOPLE BELIEVE IN CREATIONISM. It's ok if someone doesn't want to know everything. Just because you do, and see the logic, does not mean other people do.
Do you really think it matters if people believe in creationism or evolution? Even for medics I don't think it's that important, and to be honest I don't think many people think about it that much at all beyond what is now this political debate. You can still have systematic biology with evolution if you want to.
Evolution is a red herring here. What's really important is the global warming issue, because in this case it really does matter what people believe, because this will determine both people's personal actions and the political climate in which governments will have to make real decisions soon.
I don't think it is correct to call ID a philosophical construct or to teach it in a philosophy class. I think it would be more correct to call it a political machination and teach it in a class on modern US politics.
It's also interesting sociologically and psychologically, in that it represents of what happens when an irresistible force of scientific evidence meets the immovable object of faith.
After about 18 months in L.A., you begin to understand the more serious problems. The L.A. culture is even more disfunctional than the culture where you lived before. It gets seriously lonely, living in Los Angeles, even though there are people all around you.
I think that's true of every major city. It certainly is in London.
Remember all the publicity about sequencing the human genome? A lot of taxpayers paid a lot of money for that. Then, it was revealed, that, so sorry, the epigenome is a lot more complex, very influential, and almost completely unknown.
To be fair, there's no way they could have known that without all the genetic work that was done. Until the sequencing was done and the number of human genes found to be much much lower than expected, there was no reason to discount the one-gene-per-function paradigm, since it does work pretty well in simpler organisms.
Every time you play a video game, you are spending time learning about a fantasy world, when you could be learning about the real world. If you study the real world, you can discover that "anti-aging" is a HUGE business, funded largely by people who have more money than scientific knowledge, and hope not to die.
You're bascially right, but there is a discipline which IMO is worthwhile, and that is trying to promote successful ageing. This means learning what you can do to age with less disability and impairment, and exploring how best to use the new lifespan we're all going to have. Human lifespan is going up by two years every decade with no sign of a natural limit and we need to be trying to make those extra years as worthwhile as possible.
Yes, I know how to spell disfunctional. I just don't like that spelling, and I made my own.
And I know how to spell ag(e)ing.
An emerging problem is that we have more data than questions. So we go from the traditional approach of 'hypothesis -> data collection -> statistical test of hypothesis -> profit' to the new sort of data driven approaches that things like genome sequencing are giving us. These go more like 'data collection -> data mining -> hypothesis generation -> ???'.
The main problem with this new approach is that you get so many possible findings from these huge datasets that you need an awful lot more data and replication to be sure they aren't flukes.
and then let them make up their own minds.
Indeed. They'll do that regardless, of course. But if we teach them critical thinking instead of blind faith, and evidence instead of fairy tales, then the choice they'll make is a lot more likely to be one that has some relation to reality.
Well quite. That was kind of my point, although I don't seem to have expressed it very well.
If you do an experiment, your application of the results to the material beyond which you directly observe is a leap of faith of some kind. You might simply have had a freak result. It happens a lot. You might be able to give your level of faith a p-value, or modify it based on further experiments, but it's still faith, however well documented.
You begin to understand this if you explore the different arguments that statisticians put forward for how to draw inferences from data. None of them are right, and none of them can rely solely on axioms of mathematics, purely because of that leap from observations to inferences about the unobserved.
While I agree with you, and I understand the anti-creationist feeling, I don't think we do ourselves any favours by trying to get things banned from teaching. It doesn't go well with our claims to be open minded and objective about what we believe. Science is based heavily on faith, because there's always a gap between evidence and what we infer from it. There are always bits of evidence that don't fit our theories or models, and we have to be honest about that.
Evolution isn't as obvious as people like to claim. If it is, then why did it take until 1859 for The Origin of Species to be published, which was more than 100 years after Linneaus described the systematic nature of biology?
The best thing to do, and the best way to develop young minds is to show them all the evidence, describe to them all of the ideas, and then let them make up their own minds. It doesn't matter in any material way whether you believe in creation or evolution, what matters, at least in science lessons, is the process by which you arrive at your conclusions.
NIH: A bunch of self-serving PhDs that make policies about public health then go on to corporations that benefit from those policies. The NIH has yet to do a scientific study on weight loss. (Note: combining diet /and/ exercise in a study is not scientific, as you can't tell if it was diet or exercise that produced the result.)
That's quite a bizarre statement. The NIH does really run any studies, it's a funding body. The have an entire center dedicated to funding obesity research. Here's an example of an NIH funded diet and weight loss study.
Obviously any trial of say diet and weight loss has to involve exercise as a factor to be held constant, otherwise you never will be able to separate the effects. Having said that since we know both diet and exercise affect obesity there isn't a lot of point studying them both separately any more. What is now needed and what the NIH is currently funding a lot of are studies to find ways to actually get people to eat properly and to exercise more by making global lifestyle changes. Kind of life this one".
I don't object to people knowing their genotypes. I only object to your genotype being sent to you by The Internet Genotype Company along with half truths and lies about the implications and guidelines for the $2000 per year 'supplements' that you need to buy from them to prevent your untimely death.
I don't know. It's a difficult question but as you rightly say one we'll have to deal with. But think about it like this: At the moment you could very easily get a complete blood test similar to what is routinely done for hospital admissions. They'll test maybe sodium, potassium, blood sugar, possibly white blood cell counts, and other stuff that I can't remember. Then add BMI, blood pressure, and heel ultrasound. These tests are all available now, are cheap, and will tell you far more about your present and future health than any genetic tests. But people don't routinely do it themselves, and probably wouldn't without a doctor to help them understand what any of it meant.
Are you sure? I just copied this from the Navigenics (one of the companies mentioned in TFA and the first one I bothered to check) website:
Navigenics Health Compass helps you understand what your genes have to say about the future of your health, and gives you action steps to take control of your health today - so you can have a healthier tomorrow.There is also a list of specific conditions they 'test' for. The small print then points out that they don't offer medical advice, although they are certainly claiming that their product will improve your health.
The US Government Accountability Office compiled a report of genetic testing that is available here, although it's only a smallish snapshot of the current situation.
Both the positive and negative implications for widespread genetic testing are favourite subjects of Ron Zimmern and Muin Khoury, and if you're interested you'll find a lot of discussion of genetic test regulation by searching for them. There's a newspaper report of a study by Khoury here, but annoyingly I can't find the original work.
..or visit London.
It's a case of balancing the risks against the rewards. Sure you might find it interesting, but a lot of people will get tests which are often meaningless medically and which they will base lifestyle or health choices on.
I'm not sure on which side of the argument I'm on at the moment, but I'm very nervous about the prospect of people selling tests for disease genes without any requirement for evidence of the disease-gene interaction, and for the correct information for the implications to be supplied to customers.
Would you like to know your SORL1 genotype? What if I told you it was possibly liked to Alzheimer's disease? What if I told you it was definitely liked to young onset Alzheimer's disease, but I was lying? Would you like your wife's genotype? How would you interpret the information? I understand the intellectual curiosity and freedom points of view but this can do harm as well as good.
A lot of commercial genetic testing is scientifically worthless, even harmful if they give you bad information about what your genetics actually means for you or your children. There needs to be some kind of regulation (regarding claims they can make, information supplied to customers, actual evidence for the disease-test relationship they claim etc), but at the moment the public health people can't agree on what form that regulation should take, so there might be a lot of this 21st century snake-oil around for a long time.
I don't know anything about California, but it could be that the government is trying to protect people from possible harms of bad and unnecessary testing.
.."long as you have a bottle of water inside" to pour into the fuel tank ("even tea," repeats this report).. With what we're currently paying for bottled water, I think you'd be better off sticking with gas.Quite. There's no mention of any random allocation of colours, so better or more aggressive players might simply be choosing to play as red. I find this explanation far more likely.
This might then turn into a self-fulfilling finding as good experienced players start to choose red because they think there's an advantage, then suddenly there is a real difference between the colours.
Well since Lords are appointed for life what ends up happening is that the current government is watched over by the Lords appointed by the last few governments. It works pretty well. Many of the Lords appointed by the current government are seen in the House as sock puppets and don't get a lot of respect.
You can read transcripts of every Lords and Commons debate on the Hansard website. It's searchable as well. The BBC also hosts a lot of video of Commons debates.
People do realise this, but it is very hard to get money to the right people, even if you can find them. Politically the World Health Organisation and the World Bank cant just ignore ministries, however corrupt they think they are. That's not to say they aren't trying.
It's also very hard to measure the successes, since we have no baseline or no indication of what would happen if there was no aid or no intervention. It's very easy to interpret our failures to completely fix problems as a failure to make any positive difference, especially since when a situation does get resolved it stops being news. You are right that good intentions plus money does not necessarily equal success, but a lot of good is done.
Since we in the West have got wealthier our perception of what is poverty has also moved upwards. Attempting to lift an entire continent out of a state it has essentially always been in is a task of unprecedented difficulty and will never be fully achieved, since our goalposts will continually move further and further away, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Having said that the OLPC project does not seem to have been very well thought out, but a lot of the ideas, especially that of empowering the children of poorer nations, are sound. It's got people thinking in the right direction, and as others have pointed out has prompted the development of similar commercial products.