Let me put it this way: would it be a good things if most of the worlds religions are facing extinction, wouldn't that be a good thing? Less wars? If most of the world's cuisines were facing extinction, wouldn't that be a good thing? Music styles and dance?
Yes. Yes. And having experiences some of these: Yes. Yes and yes.
Recent history suggests that this is no longer true.
WWII started just over 20 years after WWI.
Since 1945, there has been no direct conflict between major powers, no use of nuclear weapons. My mother once told me that she seriously expected WWIII to begin in the 60's. It didn't happen; it still hasn't happened. Maybe we've learned - a little.
Bandwidth costs have always been higher here, and it's not all to do with a lack of local competition, although that used to be a credible story back when Telstra was charging twenty cents a megabyte for permanent dial-up connectivity.
In 1997, Telstra were charging 19.5c per MB. In 2007:
Additional usage charged at $0.15/MB, apart from members on the BigPond Liberty plans.
When run by homeopaths, they produce positive results.
When actual scientists are around to observe the procedure, homeopathy performs no better than placebo.
Homeopathy is not rejected merely because it is absurd pseudoscience that flies in the face of everything known about physics, chemistry and biology, it is rejected because it does not work.
Yet, thousands successful cases of homeopathy use have been reported around the globe, and I am also talking about veterinary homeopathy (which dismisses many of the placebo arguments).
The plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence".
Even when evidence for homeopathy is shown in clinical studies, it is invariably the case that the studies are flawed, and the evidence disappears when the experiment is re-run with proper controls.
There is no verified evidence that homeopathy does a damn thing. That's quite apart from it being physically, chemically, and biologically impossible.
What they do is "blind" trials so that the patients don't know whether they are getting the remedy or the placebo, or better, "double blind" trials where the experimenter doesn't know which is which either (they are recorded by number only, and the results are matched up at the end).
The Benveniste experiment is a famous example of a failed experimental protocol. The experimenters were actually rejecting results that "looked wrong", thus skewing the entire experiment. When a blinded protocol was applied the results immediately disappeared.
Western medicine's first reaction to anything is rejection. They probably hated the x-ray and antibiotics when they first came out also, so basically, modern medical science is not all that advances in my opinion.
Not even remotely true. X-rays and antibiotics were immediately hailed as huge advances. The first reaction of science is always doubt: Well, that sounds good; but let's repeat the experiment first.
Homeopathic results never survive independent verification.
The answer is, as others have said, right there on the Wikipedia page:
The team traveled to Benveniste's lab and the experiments were re-run. In the first series the original experimental procedure was carried out as it had been when the paper was first submitted for publication. The experiments were successful, matching the published data quite closely. However, Maddox noted that during the procedure the experimenters were aware of which test tubes originally contained the antibodies and which did not. A second experimental series was started with Maddox and his team in charge of the double-blinding; notebooks were photographed, the lab videotaped, and vials juggled and secretly coded. Randi went so far as to wrap the labels in tinfoil, seal them in an envelope, and then stick them on the ceiling so Benveniste and his colleagues could not read them. Although everyone was confident that the outcome would be the same, reportedly including the Maddox-led team, the effect immediately disappeared.
Despite having been shown that his results were entirely due to experimenter bias allowed by his own poor experimental design, Benveniste believed in water memory to the day he died. This is not untypical.
I've been taking 30C Anecdotus Unconfirmedus for years, and I never get sick. The occasional headache disappears in an hour or two, colds are cured in just a few days, and that nasty throat infection cleared right up. Well, I did go to the doctor and get some antibiotics just to keep my wife happy, but I know what really did the trick.
If homeopathy were actually effective, it wouldn't matter whether the patient believed in it or not; it would be distinctly superior to placebo in double-blind trials.
It isn't.
What you are suggesting is that the only thing that matters in homeopathy is lying to the patient. I'll note that you can do this quite readily without all that dilution and succussion rigmarole.
The apparently high infant mortality rate in the US is partly (perhaps mostly, but I'll leave that to the researchers) due to a difference in the way statistics are reported. Severely underweight babies that are born alive but die shortly afterwards are reported as infant mortality in the US but as stillbirths in many other countries.
Randi not only clearly lays out the scientific absurdity of homeopathy, he has also played a significant role in exposing the experimental sloppiness that has produced apparent confirmation of homeopathic effects (see Benveniste, Jacques). Randi is spot on in both his statements of science and his criticism of homeopaths; your criticism is baseless.
Homeopathy had a lot of empirical studies showing it's better than placebo. Its effects have been proved even in babies and animals.
Curiously enough, these positive results invariably disappear when the experiments are repeated with proper protocols. One might almost begin to suspect that homeopaths are incompetent or dishonest...
Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 4, Informative
Ennis's work appears to be identical to that of Jacques Benveniste. Benveniste also showed positive results for ultra-dilute solutions - until James Randi adjusted the experimental protocol to exclude confirmation bias, whereupon the results disappeared.
As the Wikipedia article states, when Ennis's tests are repeated with a proper protocol in place, the results likewise disappear. The conclusion is straightforward: Ennis is a sloppy experimenter - probably honest, but incompetent.
Wow, so much economic illiteracy in such a small space. I hardly know where to start, so I won't. But -
If we answer that question, and do it well, there is no longer any reason why you, "The One And Only", cannot have a personal copy of the Library of Alexandria for yourself.
You mean, apart from the fact that it was destroyed centuries ago and many of the books lost forever? Everything that survived is well and truly in the public domain and probably available from Project Gutenberg right now.
There is a huge and ever-growing demand for good programmers. The supply of such programmers is, while not fixed, certainly some sub-linear function of CS graduates, possibly the square root.
If you're turning out 100 CS graduates a year from a given population, 10% will be great, 20% good, 50% adequate, and 20% terrible. Because there's a self-selection process where people who like programming and are good at it are most likely to study it.
But if it's seen as the easy way to make money and you're churning out 10,000 graduates a year, you'll find that 1% are great, 2% good, 5% adequate, and 92% terrible. If we're not there yet, that's where we are headed.
Then I've also had the misfortune to work with people with "15 years of experience" who have clearly been making the same mistakes each year for 15 years.
Yeah, one year of experience, 15 times. I've dealt with my share of them too.
Yes it does, it tells us that they were all college students. As such, I think it safe to assume that the vast majority of them are in the 18-23 age range.
You are quite correct. Okay, that objection is pretty much trashed.
That was my first thought too. Older people tend to be more conservative (socially, financially, politically) for a whole host of reasons. Given a known correlation between age and conservatism and a known (inverse) correlation between age and response time, this experiment tells us exactly nothing unless we know the age distribution of the subjects. (Age isn't the only possible confounding factor, just the most obvious one.)
Naturally, the linked article tells us nothing at all about this, instead making generalisations that are unsupportable even if the experimental result is valid.
France never saved the US from anything; they merely squabbled with America's enemy of the day at the same time. Since France was in those days intermittently at war with pretty much everyone, this is little more than historical accident.
Now, French revolutionary thought had a great influence on the founding fathers of America, but if you look at how the French revolution played out, and what followed in the 18th century, you'll find that France was the ally of no-one but itself.
Nope. I know enough about high-scaling distributed applications to be dangerous, since that's what I do for a living. I know PHP runs sites like Wikipedia and Digg, among others. I know I've never seen a blogger go on record to complain about PHP not scaling as he expected, while for RoR that sort of thing seemed quite common in the last year and a half or so.
PHP doesn't scale at all. It's a shared-nothing system, so whatever scaling issues you run into are, by definition, nothing to do with PHP itself; they're Apache issues or Linux issues or MySQL issues.
I use CherryPy, which can be run as a shared-nothing system under Apache or as a standalone multi-threaded server. I haven't used Rails, but I believe it offers the same choice. If so, people running into Rails scaling problems simply weren't using it appropriately.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and Godwin.
Recent history suggests that this is no longer true.
WWII started just over 20 years after WWI.
Since 1945, there has been no direct conflict between major powers, no use of nuclear weapons. My mother once told me that she seriously expected WWIII to begin in the 60's. It didn't happen; it still hasn't happened. Maybe we've learned - a little.
Such trials have indeed been done.
When run by homeopaths, they produce positive results.
When actual scientists are around to observe the procedure, homeopathy performs no better than placebo.
Homeopathy is not rejected merely because it is absurd pseudoscience that flies in the face of everything known about physics, chemistry and biology, it is rejected because it does not work.
Even when evidence for homeopathy is shown in clinical studies, it is invariably the case that the studies are flawed, and the evidence disappears when the experiment is re-run with proper controls.
There is no verified evidence that homeopathy does a damn thing. That's quite apart from it being physically, chemically, and biologically impossible.
They don't do anything of the sort.
What they do is "blind" trials so that the patients don't know whether they are getting the remedy or the placebo, or better, "double blind" trials where the experimenter doesn't know which is which either (they are recorded by number only, and the results are matched up at the end).
The Benveniste experiment is a famous example of a failed experimental protocol. The experimenters were actually rejecting results that "looked wrong", thus skewing the entire experiment. When a blinded protocol was applied the results immediately disappeared.
Homeopathic results never survive independent verification.
I've been taking 30C Anecdotus Unconfirmedus for years, and I never get sick. The occasional headache disappears in an hour or two, colds are cured in just a few days, and that nasty throat infection cleared right up. Well, I did go to the doctor and get some antibiotics just to keep my wife happy, but I know what really did the trick.
If homeopathy were actually effective, it wouldn't matter whether the patient believed in it or not; it would be distinctly superior to placebo in double-blind trials.
It isn't.
What you are suggesting is that the only thing that matters in homeopathy is lying to the patient. I'll note that you can do this quite readily without all that dilution and succussion rigmarole.
The apparently high infant mortality rate in the US is partly (perhaps mostly, but I'll leave that to the researchers) due to a difference in the way statistics are reported. Severely underweight babies that are born alive but die shortly afterwards are reported as infant mortality in the US but as stillbirths in many other countries.
Something you might not have noticed: Water is a liquid.
Randi not only clearly lays out the scientific absurdity of homeopathy, he has also played a significant role in exposing the experimental sloppiness that has produced apparent confirmation of homeopathic effects (see Benveniste, Jacques). Randi is spot on in both his statements of science and his criticism of homeopaths; your criticism is baseless.
Ennis's work appears to be identical to that of Jacques Benveniste. Benveniste also showed positive results for ultra-dilute solutions - until James Randi adjusted the experimental protocol to exclude confirmation bias, whereupon the results disappeared.
As the Wikipedia article states, when Ennis's tests are repeated with a proper protocol in place, the results likewise disappear. The conclusion is straightforward: Ennis is a sloppy experimenter - probably honest, but incompetent.
Right.
There is a huge and ever-growing demand for good programmers. The supply of such programmers is, while not fixed, certainly some sub-linear function of CS graduates, possibly the square root.
If you're turning out 100 CS graduates a year from a given population, 10% will be great, 20% good, 50% adequate, and 20% terrible. Because there's a self-selection process where people who like programming and are good at it are most likely to study it.
But if it's seen as the easy way to make money and you're churning out 10,000 graduates a year, you'll find that 1% are great, 2% good, 5% adequate, and 92% terrible. If we're not there yet, that's where we are headed.
Yep, it's very similar to bubble memory, only the loops the magnetic domains travel on are now vertical, giving much higher density and speed.
That was my first thought too. Older people tend to be more conservative (socially, financially, politically) for a whole host of reasons. Given a known correlation between age and conservatism and a known (inverse) correlation between age and response time, this experiment tells us exactly nothing unless we know the age distribution of the subjects. (Age isn't the only possible confounding factor, just the most obvious one.)
Naturally, the linked article tells us nothing at all about this, instead making generalisations that are unsupportable even if the experimental result is valid.
s/France/US/ for historical accuracy.
France never saved the US from anything; they merely squabbled with America's enemy of the day at the same time. Since France was in those days intermittently at war with pretty much everyone, this is little more than historical accident.
Now, French revolutionary thought had a great influence on the founding fathers of America, but if you look at how the French revolution played out, and what followed in the 18th century, you'll find that France was the ally of no-one but itself.
Says Wernher von Braun.
I use CherryPy, which can be run as a shared-nothing system under Apache or as a standalone multi-threaded server. I haven't used Rails, but I believe it offers the same choice. If so, people running into Rails scaling problems simply weren't using it appropriately.