The problem of improper controls and false positives is really serious with these fMRI studies. It can be summed up in three words, really: Thinking dead salmon.
On one hand, this would be very scary, if one were locked in like that, unable to speak, move, and thought to be in a vegetative state. TFA does a great job drumming up that fear in the readers.
On the other hand, fMRI studies also find dead salmon do a lot of thinking. The whole fMRI field suffers from what we'll generously call "Statistical Issues," and until we get better handle on it, I'm going to remain somewhat dubious about fMRI studies that claim to be able to detect this or that. 4/27 is not a stellar rate, and it isn't implausible that these 4 are really vegetative people who have various parts of their brains active as a matter of course.
People who peddle such filth as this "National Geographic" should be arrested for distributing pornography to minors! These "Libraries" are nothing more than smuthouses for the underaged! Think of the children!
Like I said elsewhere, it's not a question of whether we pay journalists or not. The question is who pays journalists. If Newspapers can't make an Ad driven model work for their online content, that's a problem with their business model. But it's not like people who read free online content are depriving journalists of food and rent - instead, the costs are just getting passed on to the ad agencies, who are paying for the content to be produced so they can put their "Corona Light" ads smack in the middle of things.
I don't necessarily think that high-quality content costs that much more to produce. Instead, I think NYT has a terrible business mechanism that is trapped too much 30 years ago to capitalize on emerging media.
This isn't about compensating journalists or not. It's not like we're currently stealing money from hard working reporters. It's a question about what kind of business model newspapers will have for online content. Not all the free newspapers aren't operating at a loss, because they aren't really free. Instead of charging you to read content, they charge advertisers, who sell adspace in and among the articles. Either way, journalists pay their bills and get fed (they get fed birdseed, but that's a problem that predates the internet by decades). What NYT has found is they can't make the ad driven model cover all their costs, at least how they're doing it now. So, they're trying to make someone else pay for it.
Frankly, this says more about the NYT's inability to have a viable business model. And less about how cheapass the public is.
Congrats. You're the person they're hoping to catch with their pay-for scheme. However, the big question is how many people are there out there like you who value online material from NYT enough to pay some money. And I have the sneaking suspicion that people like you are an endangered species. Most people, when they make the sub-conscious mental calculation weighing (Value of NYT - cost) against (Value of free alternative) find that it's not in their economic interest to pay for content. NYT either needs some really amazing content, or some really low prices to keep their online material competitive!
This is in spite of $160M spent on modernizing LORAN stations over the past 10 years.
There's this thing called the Concorde Fallacy that is relevant here. It doesn't matter how much money you spent, all that should matter is anticipated future costs and benefits. And I think for a 200m redundant navigation system, future costs >> benefits.
The plaintiff is a serial litigant. He's sued just about everyone and his uncle before. While I agree, there needs to be protection for those with less extreme claims, there also needs to be more teeth to punishing those who abuse the system. A nice place to start is to punish those with outlandish or vindictive claims.
That thought had occurred to me. If he's really having that hard of a time sleeping, he could easily build a faraday cage around his bed, at the very least. It's not like they're incredibly complex. And he'd get some respite, and the ability to catch some Zs.
To the defendant: Make sure a judge hears the case, not a jury.
It's a sad indictment of the US's critical thinking skills that this is true. Juries are too willing to take personal testimony uncritically. "Well, Jane said she got better after rubbing her head with a ferret, so it must be true." Or something like that.
I have a way to be fair to this guy, as well as punish people abusing torts. It's very simple: a) If he can demonstrate his ability to detect electromagnetic fields under reasonable experimental conditions, they'll consider his case. b) If he can't demonstrate his ability to detect electromagnetic fields under reasonable experimental conditions significantly more than chance, he owes the plaintiff the same amount he's seeking.
I call this the `put up or shut up` principle. Although, it might be more widely known as the `Let's not be flaming idiots` principle.
400 years since the observation by an eminent scientist, who then turned that observation into a revolution of astronomy? The life and times of Galileo? The rise of Heliocentrism? You know. Stuff that they said in the slashdot article?
Exactly. This is my big problem. In essence, the white guy uses his mega-awesome white guy abilities and saves the in tune with nature natives from the other whiteguys. So, it's Dances with Wolves without the one element that made Dances with Wolves worth watching. What's awful is it totally misses what made Dances with Wolves not suck, and it went right for a whole load of imperialistic garbage. The dialog would have to be really ****ing good to make up for "white-guy-proxy is now king-of-the-tribe and will lead the natives to salvation."
Cameron would have to be really tone deaf to miss how offensive that message might be. Given, in the real world, the wise benevolent leadership of white males has been historically less than kind to Natives. There might be hope, though. I haven't heard of a single review that comments positively on the film's plot. If people like it, it's because of the eyecandy.
So? All the human blood parasites would also find it hard if humans simply ceased to be. There are many instances of animals supremely adapted for leeching off the hard work of another animal, some as parasites and others as commensal species, or even mutualists. For these foxes, humans now are their natural environment, and the wild may be as alien to them as the bottom of the ocean.
Two other notes. Belyaev used a large founding stock, and hasn't been many deleterious recessives popping up. There are some traits that have been expressed, that were undesirable (esp. coat traits, since they were hoping to sell these to the fur industry), but they're linked to the lower standing epinephrine levels. In fact, that's where much of the argument for `much of what we se as domestication is spandrals` comes from. And There is no such thing is devolving. And evolution has no peak. Everything is changing, all the time. The idea that evolution can stop, or even reverse, is patently absurd.
I whole heartedly disagree with your entire first and last paragraph. First of all, this research is not recent. We've known about MHC mediated mating preferences in mice since 1976 (Yamazaki et al.), and we've known about disassortative odour preference among humans since 1995 (Wedekind et al). The odour preference study was repeated in Brazil in 2005. Ober in 1997 analyized mating patterns in Hutterite colonies and found a disassortative mating patterns. Not just preference, this is actually who is _marry_ who!
Further studies in other animals such as Sticklebacks (Milinski et al 2005), the aformentioned mice, the African Buffalo (Weink 1998), Fat-Tailed Dwarf Lemurs (Schwensow et al 2007), and it was suggested amongst San Nicolas Island fox (Aguilar et al 2004). These are just some of the diverse taxa the patterns have been noted in! You are hard pressed to find a more supported hypothesis!
Are there other factors? Yes. Only an fool would deny this. But this is not to say MHC genotype is not a factor. And variance in expression of this disassortative drive is scarcely an argument to the contrary either. By way of example, just because some birds of paradise mate with ragged males does not mean females do not, on average, prefer males with elaborate tail plumage. Similarly, just because a some human couples are MHC similar does not argue that the average behaviour is to mate disassortatively.
I don't think anyone's stupid enough to think there's a single correlate to mate selection.
I think you underestimate the market-share of stupid.
Okay, aside from people who think all they need is a sweet ride and the chicks will be all over them...:P Some groups do oversell correlates, but given how pervasive our MHC findings are, and how ancient the mechanism seems to be, I don't think we're over-stating it.
Such a study would be riddled with false positives for any moderate sample size. In order to get statistical power over the whole genome (which is what you're proposing) you'd need a town's worth of data to even begin to correct for multiple tests. Whole Genome Inference is definitely in its infancy, and there's serious questions as to whether we'll ever be able to do it. It's much scientifically safer to approach these things with very specific hypothesis in mind.
contrary side of researchers who found happily married couples with similar immune systems instead of complementary
In any system there's going to be some variance. Sometimes, female birds of paradise don't choose the male with the most elaborate tail; sometimes they choose the ratty, haggard male. That's not to say that the tail is useless in attracting mates. It's the `average behaviour` we're interested in, and several studies have shown that on average, humans (and dozens of other species as far removed as sticklebacks) mate disassortatively with respect to their MHC type.
I didn't RTFA, because I can proudly say that I was involved in the group that produced MHC mediated sexual selection studies that ScientificMatch.com uses to claim their rationale. A few comments: First, if Scientific match has any wits about them, they'll also consider other information. I don't think anyone's stupid enough to think there's a single correlate to mate selection. But the worry about people who are too different is poorly founded - MHC diversity is strongly retained throughout most human lineages. We've had negative frequency dependant since we were swimming in the ocean, and as a result, if you sequenced any given allele, you'd find that it's just as related to Gorilla sequence as it is another randomly chosen allele. My ex-boss used to have students do this as an exercise to illustrate the point. Because of this, you're just as likely to find someone very MHC (or in humans, HLA) dissimilar next door in these modern, mobile times, than you are in, say, in a distant country.
Second: They're only (to my knowledge) matching at MHC for disassortative matings, not the rest of the Genome. How is this better than picking someone based on hobbies? Because research actually shows that mating patterns in humans follows this pattern. It is a bit of a crock, since the odds of you picking two people at random with similar MHC complements is low, but let's not get into that.;)
Finally, let me just say, I'm proud that so much scientific blood, sweat and tears into understanding the maintenance of the immune system, and what drives host-parasite co-evolution, has been distilled into an online dating site. Forget having worked with a Nobel laureate, this the highest honour a scientist can know.;)
But in many areas, PM 2.5 isn't a big issue. Definitely not in a windy area like this island. So long as the stacks are tall enough, air quality doesn't go down commensurately. It's only in places that form inversion layers, or places that are just otherwise calm that have PM 2.5 issues. Compared to other sources, though, the Straw is much better because a) I'm guessing it doesn't take as much energy to get there and b) is carbon neutral.
Or, that's my understanding of PM 2.5, anyhow. Fairbanks, AK has PM 2.5 issues due to its inversion layer and large number of wood stoves. So I've learnt what I've learnt from the happenings, here.
Time to go back to dialup. Why, no one ever pirated anything back then. Oh, er, wait...
It seems to me that the argument is shades of the tax on CDRs. Obviously, they argue, this service (unlimited broadband) is primarily used for committing IP infractions. Well, sure, but like CDRs, there's a lot of legitimate uses for broadband, too. I'd think that the push all over for schools to get broadband and computers would sort of make that clear. At least, I didn't think it's getting installed to hep people get warez.
Sadly, if the world works the way it tends to work, the whining idio... er, industry execs will get the final say.
Yeah, I thought a lot of these were of questionable "greater good," and seemed more like things that organized govt should be doing on its own anyhow. And a couple, like the Scientist one, that seemed odd and random. I groked that the transportation one was more about developing new transportation technology. Which is the one that had the most potential, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem of improper controls and false positives is really serious with these fMRI studies. It can be summed up in three words, really: Thinking dead salmon.
On one hand, this would be very scary, if one were locked in like that, unable to speak, move, and thought to be in a vegetative state. TFA does a great job drumming up that fear in the readers.
On the other hand, fMRI studies also find dead salmon do a lot of thinking. The whole fMRI field suffers from what we'll generously call "Statistical Issues," and until we get better handle on it, I'm going to remain somewhat dubious about fMRI studies that claim to be able to detect this or that. 4/27 is not a stellar rate, and it isn't implausible that these 4 are really vegetative people who have various parts of their brains active as a matter of course.
Please stop giving George Lucas ideas. :(
People who peddle such filth as this "National Geographic" should be arrested for distributing pornography to minors! These "Libraries" are nothing more than smuthouses for the underaged! Think of the children!
Like I said elsewhere, it's not a question of whether we pay journalists or not. The question is who pays journalists. If Newspapers can't make an Ad driven model work for their online content, that's a problem with their business model. But it's not like people who read free online content are depriving journalists of food and rent - instead, the costs are just getting passed on to the ad agencies, who are paying for the content to be produced so they can put their "Corona Light" ads smack in the middle of things.
I don't necessarily think that high-quality content costs that much more to produce. Instead, I think NYT has a terrible business mechanism that is trapped too much 30 years ago to capitalize on emerging media.
This isn't about compensating journalists or not. It's not like we're currently stealing money from hard working reporters. It's a question about what kind of business model newspapers will have for online content. Not all the free newspapers aren't operating at a loss, because they aren't really free. Instead of charging you to read content, they charge advertisers, who sell adspace in and among the articles. Either way, journalists pay their bills and get fed (they get fed birdseed, but that's a problem that predates the internet by decades). What NYT has found is they can't make the ad driven model cover all their costs, at least how they're doing it now. So, they're trying to make someone else pay for it.
Frankly, this says more about the NYT's inability to have a viable business model. And less about how cheapass the public is.
Congrats. You're the person they're hoping to catch with their pay-for scheme. However, the big question is how many people are there out there like you who value online material from NYT enough to pay some money. And I have the sneaking suspicion that people like you are an endangered species. Most people, when they make the sub-conscious mental calculation weighing (Value of NYT - cost) against (Value of free alternative) find that it's not in their economic interest to pay for content. NYT either needs some really amazing content, or some really low prices to keep their online material competitive!
This is in spite of $160M spent on modernizing LORAN stations over the past 10 years.
There's this thing called the Concorde Fallacy that is relevant here. It doesn't matter how much money you spent, all that should matter is anticipated future costs and benefits. And I think for a 200m redundant navigation system, future costs >> benefits.
The plaintiff is a serial litigant. He's sued just about everyone and his uncle before. While I agree, there needs to be protection for those with less extreme claims, there also needs to be more teeth to punishing those who abuse the system. A nice place to start is to punish those with outlandish or vindictive claims.
That thought had occurred to me. If he's really having that hard of a time sleeping, he could easily build a faraday cage around his bed, at the very least. It's not like they're incredibly complex. And he'd get some respite, and the ability to catch some Zs.
Unless, that is, he's not sensitive to squat.
To the defendant: Make sure a judge hears the case, not a jury.
It's a sad indictment of the US's critical thinking skills that this is true. Juries are too willing to take personal testimony uncritically. "Well, Jane said she got better after rubbing her head with a ferret, so it must be true." Or something like that.
Oops. Not Plaintiff. Defendant. Brain fart, on my part.
I have a way to be fair to this guy, as well as punish people abusing torts. It's very simple:
a) If he can demonstrate his ability to detect electromagnetic fields under reasonable experimental conditions, they'll consider his case.
b) If he can't demonstrate his ability to detect electromagnetic fields under reasonable experimental conditions significantly more than chance, he owes the plaintiff the same amount he's seeking.
I call this the `put up or shut up` principle. Although, it might be more widely known as the `Let's not be flaming idiots` principle.
400 years since the observation by an eminent scientist, who then turned that observation into a revolution of astronomy? The life and times of Galileo? The rise of Heliocentrism?
You know. Stuff that they said in the slashdot article?
Exactly. This is my big problem. In essence, the white guy uses his mega-awesome white guy abilities and saves the in tune with nature natives from the other whiteguys. So, it's Dances with Wolves without the one element that made Dances with Wolves worth watching. What's awful is it totally misses what made Dances with Wolves not suck, and it went right for a whole load of imperialistic garbage. The dialog would have to be really ****ing good to make up for "white-guy-proxy is now king-of-the-tribe and will lead the natives to salvation."
Cameron would have to be really tone deaf to miss how offensive that message might be. Given, in the real world, the wise benevolent leadership of white males has been historically less than kind to Natives.
There might be hope, though. I haven't heard of a single review that comments positively on the film's plot. If people like it, it's because of the eyecandy.
So? All the human blood parasites would also find it hard if humans simply ceased to be. There are many instances of animals supremely adapted for leeching off the hard work of another animal, some as parasites and others as commensal species, or even mutualists. For these foxes, humans now are their natural environment, and the wild may be as alien to them as the bottom of the ocean.
Two other notes. Belyaev used a large founding stock, and hasn't been many deleterious recessives popping up. There are some traits that have been expressed, that were undesirable (esp. coat traits, since they were hoping to sell these to the fur industry), but they're linked to the lower standing epinephrine levels. In fact, that's where much of the argument for `much of what we se as domestication is spandrals` comes from.
And There is no such thing is devolving. And evolution has no peak. Everything is changing, all the time. The idea that evolution can stop, or even reverse, is patently absurd.
Slashdotters are fond of pointing out that you should never ascribe to malice what you can ascribe to incompetence.
I whole heartedly disagree with your entire first and last paragraph. First of all, this research is not recent. We've known about MHC mediated mating preferences in mice since 1976 (Yamazaki et al.), and we've known about disassortative odour preference among humans since 1995 (Wedekind et al). The odour preference study was repeated in Brazil in 2005. Ober in 1997 analyized mating patterns in Hutterite colonies and found a disassortative mating patterns. Not just preference, this is actually who is _marry_ who!
Further studies in other animals such as Sticklebacks (Milinski et al 2005), the aformentioned mice, the African Buffalo (Weink 1998), Fat-Tailed Dwarf Lemurs (Schwensow et al 2007), and it was suggested amongst San Nicolas Island fox (Aguilar et al 2004). These are just some of the diverse taxa the patterns have been noted in! You are hard pressed to find a more supported hypothesis!
Are there other factors? Yes. Only an fool would deny this. But this is not to say MHC genotype is not a factor. And variance in expression of this disassortative drive is scarcely an argument to the contrary either. By way of example, just because some birds of paradise mate with ragged males does not mean females do not, on average, prefer males with elaborate tail plumage. Similarly, just because a some human couples are MHC similar does not argue that the average behaviour is to mate disassortatively.
I don't think anyone's stupid enough to think there's a single correlate to mate selection.
I think you underestimate the market-share of stupid.
Okay, aside from people who think all they need is a sweet ride and the chicks will be all over them... :P
Some groups do oversell correlates, but given how pervasive our MHC findings are, and how ancient the mechanism seems to be, I don't think we're over-stating it.
Such a study would be riddled with false positives for any moderate sample size. In order to get statistical power over the whole genome (which is what you're proposing) you'd need a town's worth of data to even begin to correct for multiple tests. Whole Genome Inference is definitely in its infancy, and there's serious questions as to whether we'll ever be able to do it. It's much scientifically safer to approach these things with very specific hypothesis in mind.
contrary side of researchers who found happily married couples with similar immune systems instead of complementary
In any system there's going to be some variance. Sometimes, female birds of paradise don't choose the male with the most elaborate tail; sometimes they choose the ratty, haggard male. That's not to say that the tail is useless in attracting mates. It's the `average behaviour` we're interested in, and several studies have shown that on average, humans (and dozens of other species as far removed as sticklebacks) mate disassortatively with respect to their MHC type.
I didn't RTFA, because I can proudly say that I was involved in the group that produced MHC mediated sexual selection studies that ScientificMatch.com uses to claim their rationale. A few comments: First, if Scientific match has any wits about them, they'll also consider other information. I don't think anyone's stupid enough to think there's a single correlate to mate selection. But the worry about people who are too different is poorly founded - MHC diversity is strongly retained throughout most human lineages. We've had negative frequency dependant since we were swimming in the ocean, and as a result, if you sequenced any given allele, you'd find that it's just as related to Gorilla sequence as it is another randomly chosen allele. My ex-boss used to have students do this as an exercise to illustrate the point. Because of this, you're just as likely to find someone very MHC (or in humans, HLA) dissimilar next door in these modern, mobile times, than you are in, say, in a distant country.
;)
;)
Second: They're only (to my knowledge) matching at MHC for disassortative matings, not the rest of the Genome. How is this better than picking someone based on hobbies? Because research actually shows that mating patterns in humans follows this pattern. It is a bit of a crock, since the odds of you picking two people at random with similar MHC complements is low, but let's not get into that.
Finally, let me just say, I'm proud that so much scientific blood, sweat and tears into understanding the maintenance of the immune system, and what drives host-parasite co-evolution, has been distilled into an online dating site. Forget having worked with a Nobel laureate, this the highest honour a scientist can know.
But in many areas, PM 2.5 isn't a big issue. Definitely not in a windy area like this island. So long as the stacks are tall enough, air quality doesn't go down commensurately. It's only in places that form inversion layers, or places that are just otherwise calm that have PM 2.5 issues. Compared to other sources, though, the Straw is much better because a) I'm guessing it doesn't take as much energy to get there and b) is carbon neutral.
Or, that's my understanding of PM 2.5, anyhow. Fairbanks, AK has PM 2.5 issues due to its inversion layer and large number of wood stoves. So I've learnt what I've learnt from the happenings, here.
Time to go back to dialup. Why, no one ever pirated anything back then. Oh, er, wait...
It seems to me that the argument is shades of the tax on CDRs. Obviously, they argue, this service (unlimited broadband) is primarily used for committing IP infractions. Well, sure, but like CDRs, there's a lot of legitimate uses for broadband, too. I'd think that the push all over for schools to get broadband and computers would sort of make that clear. At least, I didn't think it's getting installed to hep people get warez.
Sadly, if the world works the way it tends to work, the whining idio... er, industry execs will get the final say.
Yeah, I thought a lot of these were of questionable "greater good," and seemed more like things that organized govt should be doing on its own anyhow. And a couple, like the Scientist one, that seemed odd and random.
I groked that the transportation one was more about developing new transportation technology. Which is the one that had the most potential, IMO.