The nydailynews.com article actually cites a few researchers talking about the problems of replacing human interaction with computer instruction: i.e., it hinders the development of social skills and creates a dependence. These are basically the same anti-TV-babysitter arguments, except with interactive devices instead of passive media. No researcher is actually quoted naming any developmental or hereditary disorders as being "caused" by too much screen time; one is even noted as insisting caution in making such claims.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a student frustrated or hindered by adding interactivity to any learning process. I think the implied benefit is sufficiently broad in its appeal that a general claim can be made. Certainly they're not necessary, and perhaps a claim could be made about setting up unmaintainable expectations (can't learn everything interactively, after all!), but because we're wired to learn from experience first and by proxy second, it's natural for any animal with a nervous system to desire this sort of learning aid.
If I had a bucket full of mod points, you'd get them all, even if you failed to spell "Hoogsteen" correctly (and accidentally made it sound less silly.)
(Mostly-irrelevant trivia: various modifications like methylation actually let DNA carry more information than just 2 bits per bp. A related molecule, RNA, has a large number of other special bases that are inserted to perform special functional roles, as well.)
And therein lies the real charm of how this story is worded: the celebration is in favour of the publication of a description, not the discovery. The last link in the summary covers the controversy a bit; though it leaves out mention of the graduate student that Watson and Crick acquired to help them through the hydrogen bonding, the name of whom escapes me at the moment. (Anyone remember?) I always felt he deserved more credit than he got.
Not exactly. In autism research, the last three are all accepted as being components of the problem, along with maternal ageing. From the other responses to my comment, I believe it's more a question of "are you a crazy self-victimizer who believes in Wakefield's nonsense?" or "are you hyper-reactive to the Wakefield crap and convinced that anyone suggesting the environment could be involved must be a Wakefield proxy?" or "are you an open-minded person who knows that we've seen weak correlations with lots of different things, that Wakefield was a Bad Person, but you know better than to jump the gun and assume we know enough to rule anything (other than the MMR vaccine) out?"
The same thing happens in response to a Fox News story: you have the anti-scientific paranoids, the pro-science-but-still-kinda-ignorant paranoids, and actual logical thinkers who let the news be just what it is, instead of buying into all of the scare tactics designed to sell the news. For obvious reasons, this is much more of a problem in the US than in most other countries.
I assume you took this prior art as inspiration? (Incidentally, I also tend to recall Sagan mentioning pulsars in the first episode of Cosmos being once believed to be a form of alien navigation. Guess that's why he and Drake put them on the plaque.)
You're reading too much into what you want to see. I asked specifically about environmental factors, and got a direct response to that question. If you want to know what she thinks about maternal factors, then I can ask her. No one's ignoring any elephants; we were simply discussing the yes/no question of whether or not environmental factors play a role.
And please don't talk down to me about the basis of sexual reproduction. I'm trying to be polite by avoiding uncited statements, and you've become increasingly aggressive. It is true that my area of expertise is evolutionary genomics, not human disease, but your wording in your first two paragraphs makes it appear as if you're swimming in much more shallow water than I am. Studying the semantics of protein networks is a large part of my PhD work. NGS and GWAS (the "modern equipment" you mention) have an immense value in the quest to understand how these complicated expression systems function, and deserve much more credit than you're giving it. The majority of these instruments were developed in response to the needs of cancer researchers, and despite the radical divide between cell cycle biology and neurology, have still been quite insightful into the workings into autism and other mental oddities.
Each fruitless reduction or empty treasure chest is still significant, in that it rules out a possibility. No scientist should ever forget that. As (apocryphally) often attributed to Edison: I have not failed 5,000 times to invent the light bulb; "I have discovered 5000 things that don’t work."
The lab is funded exclusively by the Canadian government, although they have recently begun looking into sharing costs with some of their collaborators at other universities. The researcher in question is the registry administrator. She has personally interviewed hundreds of families from across North America, tracks almost three thousand of them, and trained under Dr. Jeanette Holden, who strongly emphasized the importance of supporting families affected by autism alongside her research in studying the underlying genetics of the spectrum. Get over Wakefield. He's done more damage by causing intelligent people to turn a blind eye to the possibility of an environmental component than he ever did by making uneducated people feel even more alienated by a medical system that they were already predisposed to hate.
Holy fuck. You crossed the line into "complete ass" very quickly. Leave the ad hominems about funding out of this, please. I'm very disappointed that you would bring something like that up.
Mutations brought on by advanced age would be caught by the genetic tests we do. That falls under her comment about the gene pool. If you really want, I can ask her specifically about her perspective on maternal age.
Slashdot Mirror
100% of sloppy journalists agree that this has never happened and could never happen.
100% of the specialists not actually cited in the article agree!
Yes. To our knowledge, sloppy journalism has yet to be linked with a rise in incidence of autistic spectrum disorders.
The nydailynews.com article actually cites a few researchers talking about the problems of replacing human interaction with computer instruction: i.e., it hinders the development of social skills and creates a dependence. These are basically the same anti-TV-babysitter arguments, except with interactive devices instead of passive media. No researcher is actually quoted naming any developmental or hereditary disorders as being "caused" by too much screen time; one is even noted as insisting caution in making such claims.
I believe we can firmly blame sloppy journalism.
Specialists think you are being a bit harsh in deriding their unfounded claims. 100% of experts interviewed agree!
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a student frustrated or hindered by adding interactivity to any learning process. I think the implied benefit is sufficiently broad in its appeal that a general claim can be made. Certainly they're not necessary, and perhaps a claim could be made about setting up unmaintainable expectations (can't learn everything interactively, after all!), but because we're wired to learn from experience first and by proxy second, it's natural for any animal with a nervous system to desire this sort of learning aid.
"Specialists" find your post inflammatory and demand financial compensation for defamation!
Agreed. That was the funniest non-sequitur I've read since I last cleaned spam off my blog. (Cheap viagra, cheap viagra, cheap viagra, cheap viagra.)
"Brought peace!"
...wait. Shit.
Unfortunately, the radioactive leech has already been replaced by the radioactive blood filtration machine.
Actually, a catheter is any tube that is inserted into a vessel or duct. In this case it would be spraying blood everywhere.
Unfortunately, there are no spiders currently cleared by the FDA for usage as a medical device.
Welcome to another exciting edition of How The Future Failed Us!
THEN: being bitten by a radioactive spider will give you superpowers.
NOW: being bitten by a radioactive spider (without the spider) is a routine diagnostic medical procedure.
I haven't heard of anyone gaining catheter-themed superpowers yet, so clearly there's something wrong here.
If I had a bucket full of mod points, you'd get them all, even if you failed to spell "Hoogsteen" correctly (and accidentally made it sound less silly.)
It's a state. They have six of them.
Don't be silly!
...
Obviously, the ghosts were women.
Actually, sources say that Watson still is a flaming asshole, but I guess he was one then, too.
That would be the one. Somewhat more graduated than I remember, I must admit.
59 is 323 in base 4. Does that make it better? :)
(Mostly-irrelevant trivia: various modifications like methylation actually let DNA carry more information than just 2 bits per bp. A related molecule, RNA, has a large number of other special bases that are inserted to perform special functional roles, as well.)
And therein lies the real charm of how this story is worded: the celebration is in favour of the publication of a description, not the discovery. The last link in the summary covers the controversy a bit; though it leaves out mention of the graduate student that Watson and Crick acquired to help them through the hydrogen bonding, the name of whom escapes me at the moment. (Anyone remember?) I always felt he deserved more credit than he got.
Not exactly. In autism research, the last three are all accepted as being components of the problem, along with maternal ageing. From the other responses to my comment, I believe it's more a question of "are you a crazy self-victimizer who believes in Wakefield's nonsense?" or "are you hyper-reactive to the Wakefield crap and convinced that anyone suggesting the environment could be involved must be a Wakefield proxy?" or "are you an open-minded person who knows that we've seen weak correlations with lots of different things, that Wakefield was a Bad Person, but you know better than to jump the gun and assume we know enough to rule anything (other than the MMR vaccine) out?"
The same thing happens in response to a Fox News story: you have the anti-scientific paranoids, the pro-science-but-still-kinda-ignorant paranoids, and actual logical thinkers who let the news be just what it is, instead of buying into all of the scare tactics designed to sell the news. For obvious reasons, this is much more of a problem in the US than in most other countries.
It's been a weird year, hasn't it?
I assume you took this prior art as inspiration? (Incidentally, I also tend to recall Sagan mentioning pulsars in the first episode of Cosmos being once believed to be a form of alien navigation. Guess that's why he and Drake put them on the plaque.)
You're reading too much into what you want to see. I asked specifically about environmental factors, and got a direct response to that question. If you want to know what she thinks about maternal factors, then I can ask her. No one's ignoring any elephants; we were simply discussing the yes/no question of whether or not environmental factors play a role.
And please don't talk down to me about the basis of sexual reproduction. I'm trying to be polite by avoiding uncited statements, and you've become increasingly aggressive. It is true that my area of expertise is evolutionary genomics, not human disease, but your wording in your first two paragraphs makes it appear as if you're swimming in much more shallow water than I am. Studying the semantics of protein networks is a large part of my PhD work. NGS and GWAS (the "modern equipment" you mention) have an immense value in the quest to understand how these complicated expression systems function, and deserve much more credit than you're giving it. The majority of these instruments were developed in response to the needs of cancer researchers, and despite the radical divide between cell cycle biology and neurology, have still been quite insightful into the workings into autism and other mental oddities.
Each fruitless reduction or empty treasure chest is still significant, in that it rules out a possibility. No scientist should ever forget that. As (apocryphally) often attributed to Edison: I have not failed 5,000 times to invent the light bulb; "I have discovered 5000 things that don’t work."
The lab is funded exclusively by the Canadian government, although they have recently begun looking into sharing costs with some of their collaborators at other universities. The researcher in question is the registry administrator. She has personally interviewed hundreds of families from across North America, tracks almost three thousand of them, and trained under Dr. Jeanette Holden, who strongly emphasized the importance of supporting families affected by autism alongside her research in studying the underlying genetics of the spectrum. Get over Wakefield. He's done more damage by causing intelligent people to turn a blind eye to the possibility of an environmental component than he ever did by making uneducated people feel even more alienated by a medical system that they were already predisposed to hate.
Holy fuck. You crossed the line into "complete ass" very quickly. Leave the ad hominems about funding out of this, please. I'm very disappointed that you would bring something like that up.
Mutations brought on by advanced age would be caught by the genetic tests we do. That falls under her comment about the gene pool. If you really want, I can ask her specifically about her perspective on maternal age.