I'm not sure we are in disagreement here. Yes, I think a lot of the disability patients would be happy to work part-time if it didn't affect their disability (and more importantly-- what I didn't mention-- their health insurance).
I should clarify here that I am talking about people who collect disability but who are not truly disabled. That's a big subset of people, and since I work in mental health, I tend to see a disproportionate number of them. I'm talking about folks who tell me, month after month, "I'm feeling fine, the meds [if they're even on meds] are working great". But they don't want to work because they'll lose their check, they'll lose their health insurance, and if they happen to get laid off from their new job, they're screwed. I can't blame them.
I don't know if I agree with the idea of "mincome" exactly, but I do I think everyone should be provided basic dormitory-style housing and food, with a minimum of questions asked. I've seen too many hundreds of people who wind up in ERs, nursing homes, and psychiatric wards because they need a place to stay. It's obscenely expensive and it turns simple charity into a ridiculous legal charade, where we have to pretend that they have a "medical condition" requiring the services of doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, etc.
It is an economic impossibility because everyone (well, enough people to make it matter) would just stop working and wait on their check.
This is already happening, to some extent. I work with a lot of people who receive SSDI disability. They're not interested in getting off disability, because "I don't want to lose my benefits". According to Wikipedia, if you got disability in 2004, you were typically receiving 86% of what you would receive from a minimum-wage job-- up from 68% in 1984. (I don't know what the figure is for 2014). If I could make 86% of my paycheck by doing nothing, I probably wouldn't want to work either.
One solution is to make work more rewarding, and that means raising the minimum wage.
I would argue that American history is a perfectly good topic for a Slashdot article. Look, I read Slashdot because it attracts a decent number of highly educated or knowledgable commenters, and I think that's still likely to be the case when the topic is a historical one.
I'm not disagreeing with you on the whole pre-DICE/post-DICE quality issue, since I don't really have an opinion on that. I just think this article was fine and you chose the wrong example to pick on.
As I recall, the novel centers around a group of scientists who are supposed to be unusually intelligent to begin with-- at one point Anderson proudly declares that their average IQ is about 165, or something-- and who become freakishly intelligent as the novel progresses. The problem is that we have a not-terribly-intelligent author trying to portray characters who are freakishly intelligent, and he fails spectacularly. He has them engage in witty repartee which isn't even as witty as an average episode of Seinfeld; he has them pepper their speech with foreign words and phrases (because that's what really smart people do, right?); and so on. Of course, it doesn't help that the characters are cardboard cutouts to begin with.
Your suggestion for a peer-reviewed medical wiki is a great one. I really wish someone would make that happen. For now, the closest thing we have to that is going to Pubmed and searching for recent review articles on a topic (everything on Pubmed is, by definition, peer reviewed). The big drawback to that is that the review articles are behind an incredibly expensive paywall, so unless you've got access to an institutional subscription (many doctors do not), you can't read them.
A bond manager met with Elon Musk to convince him to abandon a successful car company and devote his talents to building better batteries? No, he didn't. This is an exceptionally clever piece of public-relations bullshit.
The bond manager's advice would ONLY make sense if Musk were sitting on some really wonderful technology-- some new science, engineering or manufacturing process that enabled him to create better/cheaper/lighter batteries than the other seven billion people on the planet. Of course everyone knows that if someone makes a breakthrough in battery technology, it'll be a game changer for EVs. A truly radical breakthrough in battery technology would be a game changer for EVERYTHING-- it would give us a path forward to dozens of alternative energy sources.
So if you read the story casually and uncritically, it generates a lot of warm fuzzy feelings about Tesla Motors. The problem is that I'm not aware that Musk has anything special or proprietary up his sleeve in the way of battery technology. He'll achieve some economies of scale with his new factories, I guess, but that's it.
The story told in the main Sandman arc (which takes up ~75 issues and 10 trade paperbacks) is not something that you can adapt to a feature film. It's too long and complex and the pieces are too beautifully interdependent.
Part of what makes Sandman brilliant is the way in which Gaiman introduces a dozen different plots and subplots, and somehow manages to tie them together by the end. When you first read the Sandman books, many of them seem to be self-contained or episodic in nature... but by the time you've gotten to The Kindly Ones, you realize that the stories aren't self-contained at all. Almost everything in the 75 issues of Sandman (well, let's say 90% of it) is designed to set up a single, very focused story about Morpheus and the decision he must make. Everything is either required for the plot, or it's required for thematic reasons.
Just to take one example: the whole sub-plot about Hob is designed to tell us something about Dream's isolation and how he deals with it. Without that, the events of The Kindly Ones don't make quite as much sense.
There's a better solution, which is just to tell Gaiman to write some more Sandman stories for the screen. We've established that the Endless hang around for billions of years and on billions of worlds-- surely there are a few more stories to tell? It's not that much of an ask. Gaiman has decided over the years that he doesn't mind going back to the Sandman well now and then (often with good results-- I thought Endless Nights was great, for example).
Oh yeah, and Cumberbatch for Morpheus (Gaiman himself said it was a good idea). Linda Hunt for Despair.
One this I find interesting is that we know have simplified the process of programming computers to the point where an slightly above average kid with an average education can develop an App. This only took 50 years, two generations.
I see your point, but I'm confused by your timeline. When did the 50 years begin and end? It seems to me that programming became accessible to the average kid in the 1980s. I don't know that it's gotten more or less accessible to the average kid since then. Maybe a little bit less so, since modern programming languages have a steeper learning curve and it takes more effort to get your feet wet.
That wasn't the only problem. The game was about 50% too long, and the middle section just went on and on with very few surprises. I also hated the fact that enemies just spawned out of thin air most of the time. One of the pleasures of a good FPS is figuring out how to enter/explore a room without letting enemies get the drop on you. You lose that element of gameplay if the enemies just materialize next to you.
When we think of music from 200, 300, 500 years ago, we think of classical music. Of course, there must have surely been "folk" music around at the time as well, but we don't really think of that. "Folk" music seems to be largely forgotten by history.
A lot of old folk music has survived. A lot of old popular music, too. Allow me to recommend Richard Thompson's "1000 Years of Pop Music". And if you listen to traditional Irish or Scottish music you'll hear some tunes that have been around for at least 250 years. Or look at Christmas carols-- some of them, like Emmanuel or Boar's Head Carol, are essentially folk tunes that have survived from the fifteenth century or earlier (which makes them older than most of the "classical" repertoire).
Today, we see all this pop music permeating contemporary culture. However, 200, 300, 500 years from now, will all our rock & roll, rap, and dubstep be largely forgotten along the mass of other "folk" music? Will people be talking of our "contemporary classical" composers (I can't even name one) as the benchmark for our generation while being ignorant of Elvis, Rakim, and Bassnectar?
Hell no. You gave the reason yourself-- most "modern classical" composers are incredibly obscure (and, I would argue, deservedly so).
I would have to know the context of how the word "adequately" was used, but a possibility is that it could have been employed in the process of clinical butt-covering. Sometimes a physician gets a bad feeling about potential adverse outcomes, yet there's maybe nothing directly actionable, and you end up with a note written in guarded terms, in preparation for legal or disciplinary review -- including perhaps careful descriptions of things that have been "adequately" evaluated or performed.
Yeah, I actually had the same thought. It's a butt-covering sort of word and it's not generally a word that leaps to mind when you are describing someone who is doing *well*. "Lipitor"-- sure, it correlates with cardiovascular disease, but it's also something that half the world takes so I doubt if it's predictive of very much (maybe it's a proxy for advanced age which increases suicide risk). "Integrated"-- the authors make the same point as you do, it suggests someone with lots of problems and lots of doctors.
My point is that you and I could sit here and speculate about what these correlations mean (that's what the authors do in their Discussion section) until the cows come home. I don't consider such speculations terribly useful. They don't teach us much about suicide or how to prevent it.
My other point is about statistical significance. What the authors are basically doing (as far as I can see) is to predict two dependent variables (completed suicide and psychiatric hospitalization) based on a total of 30,000-40,000 independent variables (the number of unique words and phrases that occurred in the notes), with a sample size of 100. That's a pretty stupid approach. With those numbers, spurious correlations are not just a likelihood; they are pretty much a mathematical certainty.
What they did was this: they identified 100 VA patients who committed suicide and then identified two "matched cohorts" who hadn't committed suicide, consisting of 70 patients each (one cohort had been hospitalized for psych reasons, the other hadn't). Then they gathered up all the doctors' notes and examined the frequency of all of the words and phrases occurring in the notes. Certain words and phrases occurred more frequently in the notes for patients who had committed suicide.
The single word which appeared to predict suicide most strongly was "agitation". Want to know which word was the second-strongest predictor of suicide? "Adequately". That's right, "adequately". Here are some of the other "predictor" words: "swab", "integrated", "Lipitor".
I guess the finding that "agitation" appears more frequently in the suicide cohort is of mild interest. (As the authors themselves point out, it simply confirms a piece of information that has already been well documented-- namely that agitated affect is a risk factor for suicide). The rest of it is obviously statistical noise. I don't know much about genetic algorithms or neural-net learning, but it seems to me that these techniques are being used to provide an end-run around any reasonable test for statistical significance.
One thing that the authors didn't comment on-- was the identity of the clinician a predictor for suicide? Maybe there were one or two clinicians who, for whatever reason, experienced a significantly higher suicide rate among their patients. (This would explain why "adequately" showed up so often-- every doctor has their own writing style with their own collection of pet phrases/words, and my guess is that certain doctors like to use the word "adequately" more often than others).
It's funny to me that the whole "Salinger is overrated" thread revolves around Catcher in the Rye, with no mention of his other works.
There's a good argument to be made that Catcher in the Rye is, indeed, over-rated. (It's one of those books which is so highly regarded, and so widely read, that it can fairly be called "over-rated" even if you think it's pretty good). I would definitely argue that "Nine Stories" is a better piece of work. If you haven't read "The Laughing Man", you should take half an hour out of your life and do it immediately-- I think it's one of the best short stories ever written.
(Short digression: I once had the pleasure of meeting a successful writer of musicals, and for some reason, I spent 20 minutes talking to him about how I thought "The Laughing Man" would be great to adapt into a musical. The writer seemed to be amused by the whole idea, or at least he didn't try to back away from me slowly. Of course I now realize that the whole conversation was moot-- he never would have gotten the rights!)
Anyway:
"Catcher in the Rye" belongs to a very specific genre which, let's face it, not everyone likes. It's a coming-of-age novel about a relatively wealthy and privileged teenager who is being groomed for a specific type of wealthy and privileged adulthood, and who realizes at the start of the novel that he does not want the sort of life he is being groomed for. (See also: Siddharta, Tonio Kroger, and on and on).
Not everyone wants to read a novel about that, and that's fine. But I think Catcher in the Rye will keep attracting fans simply because the narrative voice is so distinctive. Remember when the Onion published an obituary of Salinger that was written in the style of Holden Caulfield? Everyone got the joke, because Holden's voice (or even an imitation of Holden's voice) is one that you recognize immediately.
I'd also argue that what Salinger did-- writing a full length novel which is narrated by a child/adolescent-- is pretty hard to pull off successfully. Mark Twain did it with Huckleberry Finn, and there was a good novel by Mark Haddon which did the same thing (The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time), but I can't think of too many other examples.
Remember those? An early attempt at a "modular" PDA. It worked OK, but the concept went nowhere. The basic unit became obsolete quickly and most of the available "add-ons" were simply built into next-gen PDAs.
Anyway, aren't most of the proposed add-ons (battery packs, external displays, pulse oximeters) already available for existing phones?
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is narcissism taken to unhealthy extremes; it describes only about 1 percent of the population.
I was being flippant, but let me try to restate my point more seriously:
There is something problematic with the idea of classifying a "personality disorder" as a type of medical disorder-- especially when the personality disorder is defined by qualities such as "arrogance" or "lack of empathy". The implication, which of course is never stated in so many words, is that "narcissism" is a condition similar to rheumatoid arthritis, and that we musn't blame those who are "afflicted" by it.
(The diagnosis of "gender identity disorder" is problematic too, for a different reason. Most transgendered individuals would bristle at the idea that they have a medical disorder. They would point out that prior to 1980, homosexuality was classified as a medical disorder as well).
In fact, I stopped treating children with ADHD in large part because I decided I did not agree with the standards of practice in child psychiatry. (I don't, in most cases, think that children should be given psychiatric meds).
The difference between me and you is that I actually understand what I'm disagreeing with, and understand the arguments that can be made on both sides of the issue. I also understand how hard it is to tell the parents of a troubled child that medications may not offer a solution.
You, on the other hand, are just hurling rude words like an angry schoolboy. The funny thing is that I probably agree with some of your beliefs. But you're not a very effective spokesman for those beliefs.
Yeah, that was odd that they didn't have ANY data on what kind of soda it was-- one would at least want to know if it was caffeinated or not. (The authors sort of apologize for this in their discussion).
On the other hand, really *detailed* information about the kind of soda wouldn't have been useful, largely for statistical reasons. There's a fair amount of literature on the relationship between artificial colors/flavors/preservatives and ADHD. And if you look at that literature, they tend to lump all of the chemicals together-- concluding (in some studies) that these additives are possibly harmful IN AGGREGATE. They can't narrow it down to say "Red No. 5 is bad but sodium benzoate is OK", or anything like that. The data just isn't there and any attempt to mine for it would be statistically underpowered.
I agree with you. This study doesn't prove anything and is complete failure. It doesn't deserve to make its way on/. unless it is to discuss how bad studies can lead media to make false conclusions from thin data and no clue.
OK, let's be honest now: did you actually read the effing article? Or just the summary?
If the answer is "yes" to question #1, please be good enough to explain how you would change the study design to make it better.
It could be that bad parenting causes both the soda and the bad behavior.
Agreed. Bad parenting is an obvious confounder. The other obvious confounder is low socio-economic status. (Picture a devoted-but-overwhelmed mother who is raising her kid in a food desert, with limited income, bad schools, high crime rates, and no support from Dad... and who is perhaps not too well educated about healthy food choices to begin with).
So let's look at the article: The authors made a valiant attempt to statistically correct for factors like this. They looked at a long list of confounders (income, maternal depression, paternal incarceration, exposure to household violence... see the linked article for a full list). It's really a solid piece of research.
Of course you're right, the soda-drinking may well capture some element of bad parenting which is not accounted for by the other socio-demographic variables. (Who the hell lets their kid drink 4+ sodas per day?) But in the end it may not be very important-- the implications for treatment are the same.
I used to treat kids for ADHD (although I don't do it anymore), and I *always* asked basic questions about the kids' diet and TV/video game watching habits. If you don't ask about this stuff, and if you don't encourage the parents to bring these things in line with what most people would consider sane and sensible... well, you're a f*cking moron. And if the parents aren't interested in talking about these things, then you know why their kid is f*cked up.
Logistics is easy for a fully armed society in full rebellion to completely disrupt. For example, no fuel means no working armored vehicles or planes.
I would imagine that the US military has more than a few days' worth of reserve fuel and could keep supply lines running for quite a while, especially within its own borders. Anyone with a military background care to comment on this thread?
I like a lot of poetry of this era (so I'm not necessarily put off by the formalism, heightened style and Classical references)... but nonetheless my opinion of this poem ranges from "mediocre" to "fucking awful". It's also more than a little insulting to its target audience of prospective immigrants.
And I gotta say that the actual statue is the most hideous thing I've ever seen. What a horrible first impression to make: "Welcome to the U.S., where we have no taste in art or literature!" (Not saying that I actually believe that about the U.S., just that this is the impression it makes.)
The entire reason behind technology is the elimination of human labor.
Not necessarily. There are all sorts of incentives for technology-- increasing human happiness, increasing safety, preserving the environment. A few (randomly chosen) examples of the above: the electric guitar, quick release ski boots, catalytic converters. None of those had anything to do with "the elimination of human labor".
There are too many potential confounders here to count. For example, thiests are probably more prone to suggestion bias, which is a MAJOR issue in psychiatry. The impressive-looking guy with a fancy degree gave me an antidepressant and a pep talk about how effective antidepressants are, so I guess I must be feeling better.
The linked abstract indicates that there was NO PLACEBO GROUP. They missed an opportunity there, because the real question of interest is whether religious belief affects placebo response.
I've noticed a general tendency in psychiatry for people to publish warm-and-fuzzy papers about how religion or spirituality leads to "better outcomes". No one ever talks about the potential harms of religion. I've got some recovering-Catholic patients they need to meet.
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I'm not sure we are in disagreement here. Yes, I think a lot of the disability patients would be happy to work part-time if it didn't affect their disability (and more importantly-- what I didn't mention-- their health insurance).
I should clarify here that I am talking about people who collect disability but who are not truly disabled. That's a big subset of people, and since I work in mental health, I tend to see a disproportionate number of them. I'm talking about folks who tell me, month after month, "I'm feeling fine, the meds [if they're even on meds] are working great". But they don't want to work because they'll lose their check, they'll lose their health insurance, and if they happen to get laid off from their new job, they're screwed. I can't blame them.
I don't know if I agree with the idea of "mincome" exactly, but I do I think everyone should be provided basic dormitory-style housing and food, with a minimum of questions asked. I've seen too many hundreds of people who wind up in ERs, nursing homes, and psychiatric wards because they need a place to stay. It's obscenely expensive and it turns simple charity into a ridiculous legal charade, where we have to pretend that they have a "medical condition" requiring the services of doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, etc.
It is an economic impossibility because everyone (well, enough people to make it matter) would just stop working and wait on their check.
This is already happening, to some extent. I work with a lot of people who receive SSDI disability. They're not interested in getting off disability, because "I don't want to lose my benefits". According to Wikipedia, if you got disability in 2004, you were typically receiving 86% of what you would receive from a minimum-wage job-- up from 68% in 1984. (I don't know what the figure is for 2014). If I could make 86% of my paycheck by doing nothing, I probably wouldn't want to work either.
One solution is to make work more rewarding, and that means raising the minimum wage.
I would argue that American history is a perfectly good topic for a Slashdot article. Look, I read Slashdot because it attracts a decent number of highly educated or knowledgable commenters, and I think that's still likely to be the case when the topic is a historical one.
I'm not disagreeing with you on the whole pre-DICE/post-DICE quality issue, since I don't really have an opinion on that. I just think this article was fine and you chose the wrong example to pick on.
Really hated Brain Wave.
As I recall, the novel centers around a group of scientists who are supposed to be unusually intelligent to begin with-- at one point Anderson proudly declares that their average IQ is about 165, or something-- and who become freakishly intelligent as the novel progresses. The problem is that we have a not-terribly-intelligent author trying to portray characters who are freakishly intelligent, and he fails spectacularly. He has them engage in witty repartee which isn't even as witty as an average episode of Seinfeld; he has them pepper their speech with foreign words and phrases (because that's what really smart people do, right?); and so on. Of course, it doesn't help that the characters are cardboard cutouts to begin with.
Your suggestion for a peer-reviewed medical wiki is a great one. I really wish someone would make that happen. For now, the closest thing we have to that is going to Pubmed and searching for recent review articles on a topic (everything on Pubmed is, by definition, peer reviewed). The big drawback to that is that the review articles are behind an incredibly expensive paywall, so unless you've got access to an institutional subscription (many doctors do not), you can't read them.
The retina is actually part of the central nervous system, not the peripheral nervous system. (Otherwise you had some good points).
A bond manager met with Elon Musk to convince him to abandon a successful car company and devote his talents to building better batteries? No, he didn't. This is an exceptionally clever piece of public-relations bullshit.
The bond manager's advice would ONLY make sense if Musk were sitting on some really wonderful technology-- some new science, engineering or manufacturing process that enabled him to create better/cheaper/lighter batteries than the other seven billion people on the planet. Of course everyone knows that if someone makes a breakthrough in battery technology, it'll be a game changer for EVs. A truly radical breakthrough in battery technology would be a game changer for EVERYTHING-- it would give us a path forward to dozens of alternative energy sources.
So if you read the story casually and uncritically, it generates a lot of warm fuzzy feelings about Tesla Motors. The problem is that I'm not aware that Musk has anything special or proprietary up his sleeve in the way of battery technology. He'll achieve some economies of scale with his new factories, I guess, but that's it.
The story told in the main Sandman arc (which takes up ~75 issues and 10 trade paperbacks) is not something that you can adapt to a feature film. It's too long and complex and the pieces are too beautifully interdependent.
Part of what makes Sandman brilliant is the way in which Gaiman introduces a dozen different plots and subplots, and somehow manages to tie them together by the end. When you first read the Sandman books, many of them seem to be self-contained or episodic in nature... but by the time you've gotten to The Kindly Ones, you realize that the stories aren't self-contained at all. Almost everything in the 75 issues of Sandman (well, let's say 90% of it) is designed to set up a single, very focused story about Morpheus and the decision he must make. Everything is either required for the plot, or it's required for thematic reasons.
Just to take one example: the whole sub-plot about Hob is designed to tell us something about Dream's isolation and how he deals with it. Without that, the events of The Kindly Ones don't make quite as much sense.
There's a better solution, which is just to tell Gaiman to write some more Sandman stories for the screen. We've established that the Endless hang around for billions of years and on billions of worlds-- surely there are a few more stories to tell? It's not that much of an ask. Gaiman has decided over the years that he doesn't mind going back to the Sandman well now and then (often with good results-- I thought Endless Nights was great, for example).
Oh yeah, and Cumberbatch for Morpheus (Gaiman himself said it was a good idea). Linda Hunt for Despair.
One this I find interesting is that we know have simplified the process of programming computers to the point where an slightly above average kid with an average education can develop an App. This only took 50 years, two generations.
I see your point, but I'm confused by your timeline. When did the 50 years begin and end? It seems to me that programming became accessible to the average kid in the 1980s. I don't know that it's gotten more or less accessible to the average kid since then. Maybe a little bit less so, since modern programming languages have a steeper learning curve and it takes more effort to get your feet wet.
It was too dark.
That wasn't the only problem. The game was about 50% too long, and the middle section just went on and on with very few surprises. I also hated the fact that enemies just spawned out of thin air most of the time. One of the pleasures of a good FPS is figuring out how to enter/explore a room without letting enemies get the drop on you. You lose that element of gameplay if the enemies just materialize next to you.
When we think of music from 200, 300, 500 years ago, we think of classical music. Of course, there must have surely been "folk" music around at the time as well, but we don't really think of that. "Folk" music seems to be largely forgotten by history.
A lot of old folk music has survived. A lot of old popular music, too. Allow me to recommend Richard Thompson's "1000 Years of Pop Music". And if you listen to traditional Irish or Scottish music you'll hear some tunes that have been around for at least 250 years. Or look at Christmas carols-- some of them, like Emmanuel or Boar's Head Carol, are essentially folk tunes that have survived from the fifteenth century or earlier (which makes them older than most of the "classical" repertoire).
Today, we see all this pop music permeating contemporary culture. However, 200, 300, 500 years from now, will all our rock & roll, rap, and dubstep be largely forgotten along the mass of other "folk" music? Will people be talking of our "contemporary classical" composers (I can't even name one) as the benchmark for our generation while being ignorant of Elvis, Rakim, and Bassnectar?
Hell no. You gave the reason yourself-- most "modern classical" composers are incredibly obscure (and, I would argue, deservedly so).
I would have to know the context of how the word "adequately" was used, but a possibility is that it could have been employed in the process of clinical butt-covering. Sometimes a physician gets a bad feeling about potential adverse outcomes, yet there's maybe nothing directly actionable, and you end up with a note written in guarded terms, in preparation for legal or disciplinary review -- including perhaps careful descriptions of things that have been "adequately" evaluated or performed.
Yeah, I actually had the same thought. It's a butt-covering sort of word and it's not generally a word that leaps to mind when you are describing someone who is doing *well*. "Lipitor"-- sure, it correlates with cardiovascular disease, but it's also something that half the world takes so I doubt if it's predictive of very much (maybe it's a proxy for advanced age which increases suicide risk). "Integrated"-- the authors make the same point as you do, it suggests someone with lots of problems and lots of doctors.
My point is that you and I could sit here and speculate about what these correlations mean (that's what the authors do in their Discussion section) until the cows come home. I don't consider such speculations terribly useful. They don't teach us much about suicide or how to prevent it.
My other point is about statistical significance. What the authors are basically doing (as far as I can see) is to predict two dependent variables (completed suicide and psychiatric hospitalization) based on a total of 30,000-40,000 independent variables (the number of unique words and phrases that occurred in the notes), with a sample size of 100. That's a pretty stupid approach. With those numbers, spurious correlations are not just a likelihood; they are pretty much a mathematical certainty.
What they did was this: they identified 100 VA patients who committed suicide and then identified two "matched cohorts" who hadn't committed suicide, consisting of 70 patients each (one cohort had been hospitalized for psych reasons, the other hadn't). Then they gathered up all the doctors' notes and examined the frequency of all of the words and phrases occurring in the notes. Certain words and phrases occurred more frequently in the notes for patients who had committed suicide.
The single word which appeared to predict suicide most strongly was "agitation". Want to know which word was the second-strongest predictor of suicide? "Adequately". That's right, "adequately". Here are some of the other "predictor" words: "swab", "integrated", "Lipitor".
I guess the finding that "agitation" appears more frequently in the suicide cohort is of mild interest. (As the authors themselves point out, it simply confirms a piece of information that has already been well documented-- namely that agitated affect is a risk factor for suicide). The rest of it is obviously statistical noise. I don't know much about genetic algorithms or neural-net learning, but it seems to me that these techniques are being used to provide an end-run around any reasonable test for statistical significance.
One thing that the authors didn't comment on-- was the identity of the clinician a predictor for suicide? Maybe there were one or two clinicians who, for whatever reason, experienced a significantly higher suicide rate among their patients. (This would explain why "adequately" showed up so often-- every doctor has their own writing style with their own collection of pet phrases/words, and my guess is that certain doctors like to use the word "adequately" more often than others).
It's funny to me that the whole "Salinger is overrated" thread revolves around Catcher in the Rye, with no mention of his other works.
There's a good argument to be made that Catcher in the Rye is, indeed, over-rated. (It's one of those books which is so highly regarded, and so widely read, that it can fairly be called "over-rated" even if you think it's pretty good). I would definitely argue that "Nine Stories" is a better piece of work. If you haven't read "The Laughing Man", you should take half an hour out of your life and do it immediately-- I think it's one of the best short stories ever written.
(Short digression: I once had the pleasure of meeting a successful writer of musicals, and for some reason, I spent 20 minutes talking to him about how I thought "The Laughing Man" would be great to adapt into a musical. The writer seemed to be amused by the whole idea, or at least he didn't try to back away from me slowly. Of course I now realize that the whole conversation was moot-- he never would have gotten the rights!)
Anyway:
"Catcher in the Rye" belongs to a very specific genre which, let's face it, not everyone likes. It's a coming-of-age novel about a relatively wealthy and privileged teenager who is being groomed for a specific type of wealthy and privileged adulthood, and who realizes at the start of the novel that he does not want the sort of life he is being groomed for. (See also: Siddharta, Tonio Kroger, and on and on).
Not everyone wants to read a novel about that, and that's fine. But I think Catcher in the Rye will keep attracting fans simply because the narrative voice is so distinctive. Remember when the Onion published an obituary of Salinger that was written in the style of Holden Caulfield? Everyone got the joke, because Holden's voice (or even an imitation of Holden's voice) is one that you recognize immediately.
I'd also argue that what Salinger did-- writing a full length novel which is narrated by a child/adolescent-- is pretty hard to pull off successfully. Mark Twain did it with Huckleberry Finn, and there was a good novel by Mark Haddon which did the same thing (The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time), but I can't think of too many other examples.
Remember those? An early attempt at a "modular" PDA. It worked OK, but the concept went nowhere. The basic unit became obsolete quickly and most of the available "add-ons" were simply built into next-gen PDAs.
Anyway, aren't most of the proposed add-ons (battery packs, external displays, pulse oximeters) already available for existing phones?
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is narcissism taken to unhealthy extremes; it describes only about 1 percent of the population.
I was being flippant, but let me try to restate my point more seriously:
There is something problematic with the idea of classifying a "personality disorder" as a type of medical disorder-- especially when the personality disorder is defined by qualities such as "arrogance" or "lack of empathy". The implication, which of course is never stated in so many words, is that "narcissism" is a condition similar to rheumatoid arthritis, and that we musn't blame those who are "afflicted" by it.
(The diagnosis of "gender identity disorder" is problematic too, for a different reason. Most transgendered individuals would bristle at the idea that they have a medical disorder. They would point out that prior to 1980, homosexuality was classified as a medical disorder as well).
Kind of an absurd turn of phrase, isn't it? It's a bit like saying that someone "suffers from" being an asshole.
(Whether Manning deserves to be called a narcissist at all... that is, of course, a whole other question).
In fact, I stopped treating children with ADHD in large part because I decided I did not agree with the standards of practice in child psychiatry. (I don't, in most cases, think that children should be given psychiatric meds).
The difference between me and you is that I actually understand what I'm disagreeing with, and understand the arguments that can be made on both sides of the issue. I also understand how hard it is to tell the parents of a troubled child that medications may not offer a solution.
You, on the other hand, are just hurling rude words like an angry schoolboy. The funny thing is that I probably agree with some of your beliefs. But you're not a very effective spokesman for those beliefs.
Yeah, that was odd that they didn't have ANY data on what kind of soda it was-- one would at least want to know if it was caffeinated or not. (The authors sort of apologize for this in their discussion).
On the other hand, really *detailed* information about the kind of soda wouldn't have been useful, largely for statistical reasons. There's a fair amount of literature on the relationship between artificial colors/flavors/preservatives and ADHD. And if you look at that literature, they tend to lump all of the chemicals together-- concluding (in some studies) that these additives are possibly harmful IN AGGREGATE. They can't narrow it down to say "Red No. 5 is bad but sodium benzoate is OK", or anything like that. The data just isn't there and any attempt to mine for it would be statistically underpowered.
I agree with you. This study doesn't prove anything and is complete failure. It doesn't deserve to make its way on /. unless it is to discuss how bad studies can lead media to make false conclusions from thin data and no clue.
OK, let's be honest now: did you actually read the effing article? Or just the summary?
If the answer is "yes" to question #1, please be good enough to explain how you would change the study design to make it better.
It could be that bad parenting causes both the soda and the bad behavior.
Agreed. Bad parenting is an obvious confounder. The other obvious confounder is low socio-economic status. (Picture a devoted-but-overwhelmed mother who is raising her kid in a food desert, with limited income, bad schools, high crime rates, and no support from Dad... and who is perhaps not too well educated about healthy food choices to begin with).
So let's look at the article: The authors made a valiant attempt to statistically correct for factors like this. They looked at a long list of confounders (income, maternal depression, paternal incarceration, exposure to household violence... see the linked article for a full list). It's really a solid piece of research.
Of course you're right, the soda-drinking may well capture some element of bad parenting which is not accounted for by the other socio-demographic variables. (Who the hell lets their kid drink 4+ sodas per day?) But in the end it may not be very important-- the implications for treatment are the same.
I used to treat kids for ADHD (although I don't do it anymore), and I *always* asked basic questions about the kids' diet and TV/video game watching habits. If you don't ask about this stuff, and if you don't encourage the parents to bring these things in line with what most people would consider sane and sensible... well, you're a f*cking moron. And if the parents aren't interested in talking about these things, then you know why their kid is f*cked up.
Logistics is easy for a fully armed society in full rebellion to completely disrupt. For example, no fuel means no working armored vehicles or planes.
I would imagine that the US military has more than a few days' worth of reserve fuel and could keep supply lines running for quite a while, especially within its own borders. Anyone with a military background care to comment on this thread?
I like a lot of poetry of this era (so I'm not necessarily put off by the formalism, heightened style and Classical references)... but nonetheless my opinion of this poem ranges from "mediocre" to "fucking awful". It's also more than a little insulting to its target audience of prospective immigrants.
And I gotta say that the actual statue is the most hideous thing I've ever seen. What a horrible first impression to make: "Welcome to the U.S., where we have no taste in art or literature!" (Not saying that I actually believe that about the U.S., just that this is the impression it makes.)
The entire reason behind technology is the elimination of human labor.
Not necessarily. There are all sorts of incentives for technology-- increasing human happiness, increasing safety, preserving the environment. A few (randomly chosen) examples of the above: the electric guitar, quick release ski boots, catalytic converters. None of those had anything to do with "the elimination of human labor".
There are too many potential confounders here to count. For example, thiests are probably more prone to suggestion bias, which is a MAJOR issue in psychiatry. The impressive-looking guy with a fancy degree gave me an antidepressant and a pep talk about how effective antidepressants are, so I guess I must be feeling better.
The linked abstract indicates that there was NO PLACEBO GROUP. They missed an opportunity there, because the real question of interest is whether religious belief affects placebo response.
I've noticed a general tendency in psychiatry for people to publish warm-and-fuzzy papers about how religion or spirituality leads to "better outcomes". No one ever talks about the potential harms of religion. I've got some recovering-Catholic patients they need to meet.