I would insist on a jury of shrinks from no less than four different mental health agencies.
What makes you think that those four different mental health agencies pursue different goals?
Exactly. Having multiple shrinks only helps if their judgements can be treated as statistically independent events. Which they can't-- the four shrinks would share common goals and common belief systems, and they would be strongly influenced by what their colleagues say.
The bottom line is you can't incarcerate someone (except for brief periods) based on the presence of "red flags". Nor should you be able to. Here's what you *might* do, though:
* If the shrink is evaluating someone and sees a red flag, empower the shrink to communicate with a) the state agency in charge of gun licenses ("Don't give this guy a firearms card") and/or b) the DMV ("You need to suspend this person's license").
* Require a psychiatric screening for everyone that applies for a gun license.
There is some precedent for both ideas. Currently, you're allowed to contact the DMV if someone has uncontrolled seizures and should not drive. And I think Great Britain requires a psych eval of new gun owners.
Hey, not saying this would work 100% of the time (there would be false positives as well as false negatives), but at least it's worth thinking about.
Third, if I start to feel an illness coming on that's respiratory-based, I immediately take a ton of direct, localized zinc (so not a pill) and stay away from acidic foods or drinks so it doesn't oxidize and it instantly prevents germs from attaching to the cells along the mucous membranes of my nose.
Most of your post sounds like good advice, but I would stay away from the nasal sprays containing zinc-- they've been linked with anosmia, which can be permanent.
'It's a chance to say, "Why did we do this? What were the good things that happened? What were the bad? How do we learn lessons from the past? How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?"
I have a couple of problems with this quote. First of all, stylistically, it resembles the sort of thing that a rather vacuous high school student might write. It also contains an egregious example of a planted assumption: "How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?" Planted assumption=We HAD to use them in Japan. The truth of this proposition may be a matter for debate-- however, it is incredibly offensive to me that this lady (who considers herself a historian or at least a student of history) believes that it is self-evident.
From what I understand, recent scholarship tends to support the opposite view, based in large part on War Department studies which came out in 1945 and have only recently been declassified.
I'm curious now to know-- how many different odors can a (properly trained) human reliably identify when they are presented simultaneously? Like the parent poster, I'm pretty sure that the answer is more than "one". I also suspect that the answer depends on what combination of odor molecules is used. (E.g., perhaps we could identify three simultaneous odorants if they all belonged to different "genera"... floral, vinegary, and bitter... but maybe it would be harder if all three were floral.) Anyway, it wouldn't be hard to design an experiment to find out.
I've actually wondered about this question in the context of cooking. There are certain chefs (Paul Prudhomme is the worst example) who tend to combine literally dozens of different flavors/odorants together-- this has always annoyed me, since I've always imagined the result would be "noisy" and muddled (in the sense that many of the flavors can no longer be distinguished, and are thus wasted)...
The lethal injection isn't used because it is humane. It is used because the drug companies like getting $250,000 a shot.
Citation, please? My understanding is that a lethal injection uses three drugs which are commonly used in medical practice and are not particularly expensive.
I agree with you that tablets are a great delivery system for books (in fact, I said so). What I disagree with is the idea that tablets are superior to books as a learning tool-- superior to such a degree, in fact, that they change the nature of education itself and reduce the importance of a human teachers.
You suggest that a tablet is something like an "automated librarian who can teach the children how to read and write". Now maybe I'm behind the times, and maybe you really can teach a child how to read and write by handing him an iPad with a really clever app on it. But you'll forgive me if I'm a little skeptical on that point.
The problem with this headline, aside from its general stupidity and sensationalism, is that it contains what debaters like to call a planted assumption. The writer is really asking something like "Now that we have this wonderful new technology called tablet computers, which are vastly superior to older forms of information transfer, are teachers obsolete?"
As the parent poster observes-- there are these things called books, which have been around for a while, and which you can use to teach yourself things. I've yet to be convinced that Zooms or IPads etc are significantly better from a learning perspective. Actually, I would argue that they are often inferior in actual practice. They tend to differ from books in the following respects: 1) more Powerpoint-style bells and whistles (which appeal to ADHD-addled brains but do not add value), 2) the ability to present any piece of prose as a form of hypertext. And hypertext, in my opinion, has done a lot to destroy actual prose writing. It essentially encourages the author to sidestep the actual work of organizing his thoughts into a coherent and linear whole.
Don't get me wrong, I think tablets are great... as a *delivery* system for traditional prose. I'm really happy that I can download a technical article in my pyjamas instead of photocopying things at a library. And yes, I can think of special use cases where the multimedia capabilities of a tablet are actually useful for learning. But for the other 99% of cases... it really doesn't matter whether I am looking at ink on paper or pixels on a screen.
Another case in point. One of my students' father was trained as an M.D. in China. The family emigrated to the U.S. and the father had to go through medical school all over just to prove he knew what he was doing. The only thing that improved in med school was his English. Were he, and hundreds of thousands other fully capable practitioners, able to come here and just hang out their shingle, you'd see health care costs plummet.
Sure you have the details straight? Normally, all that a foreign MD would have to do is complete a medical residency and pass a few exams, and (s)he's ready to hang out a shingle. In fact it's done all the time (something like 20% of US physicians graduated from a non-US medical school).
But I agree with you about the FDA's harassment of EarTrumpet. Absolutely fucking moronic. I notice that they still sell EarTrumpet, but they had to remove certain features because of the FDA...
We've already found drugs that can keep a person going without sleep for weeks or months at a time, apparently without any significant reduction in cognitive ability or any significant change in neurological functioning.
The real problem is that there are too many copywritten, closed-source rating scales being used in mental health. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-2), the MMPI-2, the SIRS, the BIDR, the MMSE, and on and on... These are all used clinically and are also used in peer-reviewed research which affects clinical practice (e.g., they are used in human trials to get FDA approval for medications). They're important, and some of them are good (or at least interesting) tools.
But when copyright forbids you from revealing what is in the rating scales, this leads to a peculiar situation. You can publish a study saying "Drug X produced a 20% reduction in the BDI-2", but you're not allowed to describe the details of what is on the Beck Depression Inventory. You can publish a 50-page "validation study" of the MMPI-2, which is full of tables stating that "a positive response to question #211 correlated with this or that clinical outcome", but you'd better not indicate what question #211 was. (The reader is expected to have paid $200 or whatever it is to obtain their own copy of the MMPI-2 so that they can follow along).
One consequence of this is that researchers are inhibited from discussing, or even thinking about, the "content validity" of the scales they use. You're unlikely to find a researcher commenting about scale items that are ambiguously worded, or which don't measure what they claim to measure. (Did you know that the MMPI-2 contains a "Psychopathic Deviate" subscale, and that one of the items on this subscale pertains to whether the subject has ever used illicit drugs? That sort of thing.) If any discussion of content validity takes place, it is conducted by the healthcare providers who actually use or develop the scales, and who have a financial and professional interest in seeing the scales as "valid". The general public doesn't get to have an opinion, because they don't get to look at the scales.
What's needed is an open source movement within the mental health field. Some researchers at St. Louis University have already created an open-source alternative to the MMSE (called the SLUMS)-- it's a good start, but much more is needed.
Looking at the original Star Trek series I find it interesting that they've got faster than light travel and transporters, but most of their computers don't have screens and they still use physical toggle switches for controls and some episodes show them printing off results on paper.
Perhaps there are situations where you *want* a physical toggle switch for ergonomic reasons? The best example I can think of is musical gear (say, a high-end synthesizer). I'd be willing to bet there are still toggle switches on a nuclear submarine.
Down and Out in Paris and London - This is where I learned that the more you pay for food at a restaurant, the more hands have touched the food (among many other things). Also, working in a Parisian kitchen in the early 20th century is like working in fast food now.
This is indeed a great book by Orwell... a shame it's not more widely known. The thing is that extremely poor people tend not to write books, and if it weren't for Orwell, we probably wouldn't know very much at all about what it was like to be a homeless person in London/Paris during the 1920s.
But I'm pretty sure that Orwell's "fancy restaurant=filthy food" thesis doesn't hold up today. At least I hope not.
Also, if you're looking for a life-altering read, I would skip "Animal Farm" (always felt that was the weakest of all Orwell's books) and go with "Politics and the English Language".
"You drift off again, but ten minutes later the alarm returns, more insistent. It won't be so easily pacified this time; the loose sensory netting inside your pillow will keep the noise going until it detects alpha waves in drastically higher numbers than theta waves."
I'm not an EEG technician, but I've worked with the machines enough to know that you can't read brainwaves using a "loose sensory netting inside a pillow". And even if you could, the suggested algorithm will not reliably distinguish between REM sleep and wakefulness.
Right out of the gate, the author predicts something which is implausible and flat-out dumb. I didn't quite stop reading at this point (I think I made it up to the part where I "insert my computer ID into my phone"), but I sure as hell didn't make it to the end.
Speaking as a doc, and as a relapsed smoker who is making another quit attempt...
There is NOTHING more effective than nicotine replacement if you want to quit smoking. Gum, lozenges, patches, Nicotrol inhalers, e-cigarettes... they all help. Which one to use seems to be a matter of personal preference, since no one has shown greater efficacy than another. (My personal view is that e-cigarettes rock.)
There are other methods, like Chantix and Wellbutrin/Zyban, but the efficacy has not been shown to be any better than nicotine replacement, and the safety profile is worse. A lot of people simply can't tolerate either medication-- either they get horrible side effects such as anxiety or panic attacks, or in the case of Wellbutrin, they may develop seizures.
If TPTB had any goddamn sense they would hand out e-cigarettes or the like on streetcorners. Instead, TPTB are doing the exact opposite. First, organizations like Public Aid decide that they're not going to provide any funding for poor people who want nicotine replacement (of course you can get funding if you want to take Chantix etc.) Then the FDA decides to hassle the e-cigarette manufacturers by sending them warning letters and threatening to regulate them like drugs (really? You've decided not to regulate regular cigarettes, but you're going to regulate e-cigarettes?) Then we have the kind of horseshit described in the article, in which people are denied employment for using nicotine replacement.
Note that I wouldn't have any problem at all if the FDA addressed the problem of (mostly Chinese-made) e-cigarettes which contain carcinogenic solvents, or addressed the problem of e-cigarettes which explode (the latter seems to be related to people who hacked and over-volted their e-cigarette, but it would be nice to have a fucking investigation just to be sure). But that's not what the FDA is concerned about. They're concerned because the e-cigarettes are not made by Big Pharma and because the manufacturers haven't spent $100 million (or whatever it costs) to get FDA approval.
I guess I don't need this pesky AMA membership and Doctor's license (another unnecessary origination that should be voluntary). I'm off to practice medicine! Maybe if I practice enough I'll get it right!
You certainly don't need an AMA membership to practice medicine. Most doctors want nothing to do with the AMA, which is essentially a lobbying group.
If all you look at is the abstract and "conclusions", of course you're going to get an unbalanced view of what the study said. Think of all the other information that is contained in the body of the paper. There's a discussion of the methodological limitations of the study, there's a discussion of all the outcome measures which DIDN'T reach statistical significance, there's a discussion of adverse events, and there's usually also a discussion of where this study fits into our knowledge of the topic as a whole (e.g., "We found fish oil supplements to be effective for arthritis but 5 of 7 previous studies have shown the opposite results"). All of this is crucial information, but you couldn't stuff it all into the abstract even if you tried.
So yeah, I'm going to lay 90% of the blame for this on the journalists. My impression is that most of them don't read the body of the article. In some cases, I would bet that they don't even possess copies of the article (since articles, unlike abstracts, are usually kept behind a very expensive paywall). That would have been an interesting statistic for the researchers to look at.
>>>a pair of balls. Not very common on an adult named 'Jimmy'.
Jimmy Swaggert (stood-up against segregation) Jimmy Carter (stood-up against Arab terrorists) Jimmy Stewart (World War 2 fighter pilot) Jimmy Buffett (okay this is a bit of a stretch)
Although Carter is perhaps better known for standing up against right-wing Israelis.
Civ V is the only Steam game I have that I play in 'single player' mode. I was curious about if I would be able to play the game without having an internet connection because the game launches through Steam.
I d/c'd my internet connection one day before booting up the computer. Then I tried to load Civ V. It sat there for about 2 minutes (normally just a few seconds) before finally giving me a dialog box along the lines of "internet detection could not be found. Would you like to play in off-line mode?" Then I got a warning saying my saved games might not be available. After that I was able to play the game as normal.
Not completely disconnected but I was happy there was a measure in place that would let me play sans internet connection.
The key point is "your saved games may not be available". For many single-player games, this renders the game unplayable.
It's paywalled (except for the abstract), so maybe not.
It's a good study, way better than most studies of this type, BUT... not a slam-dunk.
1) There were 1,037 subjects, but only 124 were "regular users" of cannabis at any timepoint. (Authors defined "regular use" as 4x/week or more). And the authors basically found that "non-regular users" (4x/week) didn't have any significant decline of IQ compared to non-users. The whole paper hangs on the rather small subset of 124 heavy smokers.
2) When you're measuring neurocognitive deficits in pot smokers, it's important to ensure that none of the test subjects have smoked weed in the last week. Otherwise you don't know if you are measuring permanent impairment vs. effects of acute intoxication/hangover. They did NOT exclude recent pot smokers (last day/last week) from the primary analysis. They DID perform a separate analysis where they excluded recent smokers, and they still found some deficits-- but the deficits were less pronounced, and more importantly, the sample size was smaller. Instead of hanging their conclusions on 124 heavy smokers, they actually hung their conclusions on (124-X) heavy smokers (and the value of X was not reported!)
3) I also noticed that the heavy smokers appear to have had a lower premorbid IQ. That doesn't necessarily invalidate the main finding, which is that the heavy smokers experienced a decline in IQ of about 6 points, whereas the light/non-smokers retained the same IQ. But it does suggest that there are a lot of confounding variables. They tried to control for certain confounders, like comorbid substance addiction and years of education, but you can't control for everything.
4) The "premorbid" IQ was measured at age 13, and the authors seemed to just assume that age 13 was "before the onset of cannabis use". Ain't necessarily the case. Heavy potheads tend to start early.
If the app impacts diagnosis in any way it is no longer just an app, it's a medical device, and subject to regulation.
This doesn't even begin to speak to patient data stored locally in an app and current HIPAA regulation.
The DSM-IV, which is simply a list of diagnostic criteria for psychiatric disorders, is available in e-book format as an "app". Is that app a medical device? What about a paper copy of the DSM-IV that I carry around in my pocket? Is that a medical device, too?
Perhaps we can now start a project to match new popular music against this database, and figure out that all new music is just a shameless copy/basic rewrite of existing classical music.
[snippage]
A practical answer to the above question would be a real benefit to musicians who don't want to replicate the "George Harrison" incident.
Oh sure, it could be useful for that. Although I suspect one side-effect might be a flurry of lawsuits as every copyright holder on Earth searched the database looking for people to sue...
Anyway, the reason I called the OP absurd wasn't because the idea of a "musical plagiarism search engine" was in itself a bad idea. It's not. What annoyed me was the implicit message that 1) modern pop music is written by imitative hacks who indulge in conscious or half-conscious plagiarism, 2) classical music suffered from no such problems, and 3) anything of musical value in pop music must have been plagiarized from a pre-twentieth-century source.
Perhaps we can now start a project to match new popular music against this database, and figure out that all new music is just a shameless copy/basic rewrite of existing classical music.
This is such an absurd statement that I don't know how to refute it without sounding absurd myself.
I know it's a joke and that you're probably trying to make a sensible statement about the formulaic quality of most pop tunes, but it comes off as pure snobbery.
Slashdot Mirror
I would insist on a jury of shrinks from no less than four different mental health agencies.
What makes you think that those four different mental health agencies pursue different goals?
Exactly. Having multiple shrinks only helps if their judgements can be treated as statistically independent events. Which they can't-- the four shrinks would share common goals and common belief systems, and they would be strongly influenced by what their colleagues say.
The bottom line is you can't incarcerate someone (except for brief periods) based on the presence of "red flags". Nor should you be able to. Here's what you *might* do, though:
* If the shrink is evaluating someone and sees a red flag, empower the shrink to communicate with a) the state agency in charge of gun licenses ("Don't give this guy a firearms card") and/or b) the DMV ("You need to suspend this person's license").
* Require a psychiatric screening for everyone that applies for a gun license.
There is some precedent for both ideas. Currently, you're allowed to contact the DMV if someone has uncontrolled seizures and should not drive. And I think Great Britain requires a psych eval of new gun owners.
Hey, not saying this would work 100% of the time (there would be false positives as well as false negatives), but at least it's worth thinking about.
A nice plane without engines is useless. Over land through Iran to China
How? Through Syria and Iraq? How easy would it be to even get the engines out of Israel without alerting border agents?
Third, if I start to feel an illness coming on that's respiratory-based, I immediately take a ton of direct, localized zinc (so not a pill) and stay away from acidic foods or drinks so it doesn't oxidize and it instantly prevents germs from attaching to the cells along the mucous membranes of my nose.
Most of your post sounds like good advice, but I would stay away from the nasal sprays containing zinc-- they've been linked with anosmia, which can be permanent.
'It's a chance to say, "Why did we do this? What were the good things that happened? What were the bad? How do we learn lessons from the past? How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?"
I have a couple of problems with this quote. First of all, stylistically, it resembles the sort of thing that a rather vacuous high school student might write. It also contains an egregious example of a planted assumption: "How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?" Planted assumption=We HAD to use them in Japan. The truth of this proposition may be a matter for debate-- however, it is incredibly offensive to me that this lady (who considers herself a historian or at least a student of history) believes that it is self-evident.
From what I understand, recent scholarship tends to support the opposite view, based in large part on War Department studies which came out in 1945 and have only recently been declassified.
I'm curious now to know-- how many different odors can a (properly trained) human reliably identify when they are presented simultaneously? Like the parent poster, I'm pretty sure that the answer is more than "one". I also suspect that the answer depends on what combination of odor molecules is used. (E.g., perhaps we could identify three simultaneous odorants if they all belonged to different "genera"... floral, vinegary, and bitter... but maybe it would be harder if all three were floral.) Anyway, it wouldn't be hard to design an experiment to find out.
I've actually wondered about this question in the context of cooking. There are certain chefs (Paul Prudhomme is the worst example) who tend to combine literally dozens of different flavors/odorants together-- this has always annoyed me, since I've always imagined the result would be "noisy" and muddled (in the sense that many of the flavors can no longer be distinguished, and are thus wasted)...
Death sticks... not powder. :) Rethink your life...
Interesting. I think you've found the one bit of dialogue in all of Ep. II that is worth quoting.
The lethal injection isn't used because it is humane. It is used because the drug companies like getting $250,000 a shot.
Citation, please? My understanding is that a lethal injection uses three drugs which are commonly used in medical practice and are not particularly expensive.
I agree with you that tablets are a great delivery system for books (in fact, I said so). What I disagree with is the idea that tablets are superior to books as a learning tool-- superior to such a degree, in fact, that they change the nature of education itself and reduce the importance of a human teachers.
You suggest that a tablet is something like an "automated librarian who can teach the children how to read and write". Now maybe I'm behind the times, and maybe you really can teach a child how to read and write by handing him an iPad with a really clever app on it. But you'll forgive me if I'm a little skeptical on that point.
The problem with this headline, aside from its general stupidity and sensationalism, is that it contains what debaters like to call a planted assumption. The writer is really asking something like "Now that we have this wonderful new technology called tablet computers, which are vastly superior to older forms of information transfer, are teachers obsolete?"
As the parent poster observes-- there are these things called books, which have been around for a while, and which you can use to teach yourself things. I've yet to be convinced that Zooms or IPads etc are significantly better from a learning perspective. Actually, I would argue that they are often inferior in actual practice. They tend to differ from books in the following respects: 1) more Powerpoint-style bells and whistles (which appeal to ADHD-addled brains but do not add value), 2) the ability to present any piece of prose as a form of hypertext. And hypertext, in my opinion, has done a lot to destroy actual prose writing. It essentially encourages the author to sidestep the actual work of organizing his thoughts into a coherent and linear whole.
Don't get me wrong, I think tablets are great... as a *delivery* system for traditional prose. I'm really happy that I can download a technical article in my pyjamas instead of photocopying things at a library. And yes, I can think of special use cases where the multimedia capabilities of a tablet are actually useful for learning. But for the other 99% of cases... it really doesn't matter whether I am looking at ink on paper or pixels on a screen.
Another case in point. One of my students' father was trained as an M.D. in China. The family emigrated to the U.S. and the father had to go through medical school all over just to prove he knew what he was doing. The only thing that improved in med school was his English. Were he, and hundreds of thousands other fully capable practitioners, able to come here and just hang out their shingle, you'd see health care costs plummet.
Sure you have the details straight? Normally, all that a foreign MD would have to do is complete a medical residency and pass a few exams, and (s)he's ready to hang out a shingle. In fact it's done all the time (something like 20% of US physicians graduated from a non-US medical school).
But I agree with you about the FDA's harassment of EarTrumpet. Absolutely fucking moronic. I notice that they still sell EarTrumpet, but they had to remove certain features because of the FDA...
We've already found drugs that can keep a person going without sleep for weeks or months at a time, apparently without any significant reduction in cognitive ability or any significant change in neurological functioning.
What drugs are those, exactly?
The real problem is that there are too many copywritten, closed-source rating scales being used in mental health. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-2), the MMPI-2, the SIRS, the BIDR, the MMSE, and on and on... These are all used clinically and are also used in peer-reviewed research which affects clinical practice (e.g., they are used in human trials to get FDA approval for medications). They're important, and some of them are good (or at least interesting) tools.
But when copyright forbids you from revealing what is in the rating scales, this leads to a peculiar situation. You can publish a study saying "Drug X produced a 20% reduction in the BDI-2", but you're not allowed to describe the details of what is on the Beck Depression Inventory. You can publish a 50-page "validation study" of the MMPI-2, which is full of tables stating that "a positive response to question #211 correlated with this or that clinical outcome", but you'd better not indicate what question #211 was.
(The reader is expected to have paid $200 or whatever it is to obtain their own copy of the MMPI-2 so that they can follow along).
One consequence of this is that researchers are inhibited from discussing, or even thinking about, the "content validity" of the scales they use. You're unlikely to find a researcher commenting about scale items that are ambiguously worded, or which don't measure what they claim to measure. (Did you know that the MMPI-2 contains a "Psychopathic Deviate" subscale, and that one of the items on this subscale pertains to whether the subject has ever used illicit drugs? That sort of thing.) If any discussion of content validity takes place, it is conducted by the healthcare providers who actually use or develop the scales, and who have a financial and professional interest in seeing the scales as "valid". The general public doesn't get to have an opinion, because they don't get to look at the scales.
What's needed is an open source movement within the mental health field. Some researchers at St. Louis University have already created an open-source alternative to the MMSE (called the SLUMS)-- it's a good start, but much more is needed.
Looking at the original Star Trek series I find it interesting that they've got faster than light travel and transporters, but most of their computers don't have screens and they still use physical toggle switches for controls and some episodes show them printing off results on paper.
Perhaps there are situations where you *want* a physical toggle switch for ergonomic reasons? The best example I can think of is musical gear (say, a high-end synthesizer). I'd be willing to bet there are still toggle switches on a nuclear submarine.
And yeah, I'm rationalizing.
The Victorians were actually quite fond of pornography. So I don't think Mr. Wells would be shocked to learn that we are, too.
In other respects, though, I think your post is dead on.
Down and Out in Paris and London - This is where I learned that the more you pay for food at a restaurant, the more hands have touched the food (among many other things). Also, working in a Parisian kitchen in the early 20th century is like working in fast food now.
This is indeed a great book by Orwell... a shame it's not more widely known. The thing is that extremely poor people tend not to write books, and if it weren't for Orwell, we probably wouldn't know very much at all about what it was like to be a homeless person in London/Paris during the 1920s.
But I'm pretty sure that Orwell's "fancy restaurant=filthy food" thesis doesn't hold up today. At least I hope not.
Also, if you're looking for a life-altering read, I would skip "Animal Farm" (always felt that was the weakest of all Orwell's books) and go with "Politics and the English Language".
"You drift off again, but ten minutes later the alarm returns, more insistent. It won't be so easily pacified this time; the loose sensory netting inside your pillow will keep the noise going until it detects alpha waves in drastically higher numbers than theta waves."
I'm not an EEG technician, but I've worked with the machines enough to know that you can't read brainwaves using a "loose sensory netting inside a pillow". And even if you could, the suggested algorithm will not reliably distinguish between REM sleep and wakefulness.
Right out of the gate, the author predicts something which is implausible and flat-out dumb. I didn't quite stop reading at this point (I think I made it up to the part where I "insert my computer ID into my phone"), but I sure as hell didn't make it to the end.
Speaking as a doc, and as a relapsed smoker who is making another quit attempt...
There is NOTHING more effective than nicotine replacement if you want to quit smoking. Gum, lozenges, patches, Nicotrol inhalers, e-cigarettes... they all help. Which one to use seems to be a matter of personal preference, since no one has shown greater efficacy than another. (My personal view is that e-cigarettes rock.)
There are other methods, like Chantix and Wellbutrin/Zyban, but the efficacy has not been shown to be any better than nicotine replacement, and the safety profile is worse. A lot of people simply can't tolerate either medication-- either they get horrible side effects such as anxiety or panic attacks, or in the case of Wellbutrin, they may develop seizures.
If TPTB had any goddamn sense they would hand out e-cigarettes or the like on streetcorners. Instead, TPTB are doing the exact opposite. First, organizations like Public Aid decide that they're not going to provide any funding for poor people who want nicotine replacement (of course you can get funding if you want to take Chantix etc.) Then the FDA decides to hassle the e-cigarette manufacturers by sending them warning letters and threatening to regulate them like drugs (really? You've decided not to regulate regular cigarettes, but you're going to regulate e-cigarettes?) Then we have the kind of horseshit described in the article, in which people are denied employment for using nicotine replacement.
Note that I wouldn't have any problem at all if the FDA addressed the problem of (mostly Chinese-made) e-cigarettes which contain carcinogenic solvents, or addressed the problem of e-cigarettes which explode (the latter seems to be related to people who hacked and over-volted their e-cigarette, but it would be nice to have a fucking investigation just to be sure). But that's not what the FDA is concerned about. They're concerned because the e-cigarettes are not made by Big Pharma and because the manufacturers haven't spent $100 million (or whatever it costs) to get FDA approval.
I guess I don't need this pesky AMA membership and Doctor's license (another unnecessary origination that should be voluntary). I'm off to practice medicine! Maybe if I practice enough I'll get it right!
You certainly don't need an AMA membership to practice medicine. Most doctors want nothing to do with the AMA, which is essentially a lobbying group.
If all you look at is the abstract and "conclusions", of course you're going to get an unbalanced view of what the study said. Think of all the other information that is contained in the body of the paper. There's a discussion of the methodological limitations of the study, there's a discussion of all the outcome measures which DIDN'T reach statistical significance, there's a discussion of adverse events, and there's usually also a discussion of where this study fits into our knowledge of the topic as a whole (e.g., "We found fish oil supplements to be effective for arthritis but 5 of 7 previous studies have shown the opposite results"). All of this is crucial information, but you couldn't stuff it all into the abstract even if you tried.
So yeah, I'm going to lay 90% of the blame for this on the journalists. My impression is that most of them don't read the body of the article. In some cases, I would bet that they don't even possess copies of the article (since articles, unlike abstracts, are usually kept behind a very expensive paywall). That would have been an interesting statistic for the researchers to look at.
>>>a pair of balls. Not very common on an adult named 'Jimmy'.
Jimmy Swaggert (stood-up against segregation)
Jimmy Carter (stood-up against Arab terrorists)
Jimmy Stewart (World War 2 fighter pilot)
Jimmy Buffett (okay this is a bit of a stretch)
Although Carter is perhaps better known for standing up against right-wing Israelis.
Civ V is the only Steam game I have that I play in 'single player' mode. I was curious about if I would be able to play the game without having an internet connection because the game launches through Steam.
I d/c'd my internet connection one day before booting up the computer. Then I tried to load Civ V. It sat there for about 2 minutes (normally just a few seconds) before finally giving me a dialog box along the lines of "internet detection could not be found. Would you like to play in off-line mode?" Then I got a warning saying my saved games might not be available. After that I was able to play the game as normal.
Not completely disconnected but I was happy there was a measure in place that would let me play sans internet connection.
The key point is "your saved games may not be available". For many single-player games, this renders the game unplayable.
It's paywalled (except for the abstract), so maybe not.
It's a good study, way better than most studies of this type, BUT... not a slam-dunk.
1) There were 1,037 subjects, but only 124 were "regular users" of cannabis at any timepoint. (Authors defined "regular use" as 4x/week or more). And the authors basically found that "non-regular users" (4x/week) didn't have any significant decline of IQ compared to non-users. The whole paper hangs on the rather small subset of 124 heavy smokers.
2) When you're measuring neurocognitive deficits in pot smokers, it's important to ensure that none of the test subjects have smoked weed in the last week. Otherwise you don't know if you are measuring permanent impairment vs. effects of acute intoxication/hangover. They did NOT exclude recent pot smokers (last day/last week) from the primary analysis. They DID perform a separate analysis where they excluded recent smokers, and they still found some deficits-- but the deficits were less pronounced, and more importantly, the sample size was smaller. Instead of hanging their conclusions on 124 heavy smokers, they actually hung their conclusions on (124-X) heavy smokers (and the value of X was not reported!)
3) I also noticed that the heavy smokers appear to have had a lower premorbid IQ. That doesn't necessarily invalidate the main finding, which is that the heavy smokers experienced a decline in IQ of about 6 points, whereas the light/non-smokers retained the same IQ. But it does suggest that there are a lot of confounding variables. They tried to control for certain confounders, like comorbid substance addiction and years of education, but you can't control for everything.
4) The "premorbid" IQ was measured at age 13, and the authors seemed to just assume that age 13 was "before the onset of cannabis use". Ain't necessarily the case. Heavy potheads tend to start early.
If the app impacts diagnosis in any way it is no longer just an app, it's a medical device, and subject to regulation.
This doesn't even begin to speak to patient data stored locally in an app and current HIPAA regulation.
The DSM-IV, which is simply a list of diagnostic criteria for psychiatric disorders, is available in e-book format as an "app". Is that app a medical device? What about a paper copy of the DSM-IV that I carry around in my pocket? Is that a medical device, too?
Perhaps we can now start a project to match new popular music against this database, and figure out that all new music is just a shameless copy/basic rewrite of existing classical music.
[snippage]
A practical answer to the above question would be a real benefit to musicians who don't want to replicate the "George Harrison" incident.
Oh sure, it could be useful for that. Although I suspect one side-effect might be a flurry of lawsuits as every copyright holder on Earth searched the database looking for people to sue...
Anyway, the reason I called the OP absurd wasn't because the idea of a "musical plagiarism search engine" was in itself a bad idea. It's not. What annoyed me was the implicit message that 1) modern pop music is written by imitative hacks who indulge in conscious or half-conscious plagiarism, 2) classical music suffered from no such problems, and 3) anything of musical value in pop music must have been plagiarized from a pre-twentieth-century source.
Perhaps we can now start a project to match new popular music against this database, and figure out that all new music is just a shameless copy/basic rewrite of existing classical music.
This is such an absurd statement that I don't know how to refute it without sounding absurd myself.
I know it's a joke and that you're probably trying to make a sensible statement about the formulaic quality of most pop tunes, but it comes off as pure snobbery.