There are efficiency losses throughout that entire conversion cycle. The only clean way to minimize those efficiency losses is to use less energy.
We're going to utilize energy. Your argument is null and void if you pretend otherwise. Yes using less is optimal but not realistic with a growing and economically advancing civilization. Your argument is akin to a company trying to endlessly cut expenses to become profitable. It works to a point but then it becomes counterproductive. We're not going to all go back to living in caves with no electricity, no plumbing, and no transportation. If you want to go off grid and live in the woods knock yourself out. The rest of us will be living here in the real world where we have an optimization problem.
Continuing to discuss this topic just plays into the hands of people who want to take your rights away.
If you don't discuss the topic then the people who want to remove your rights will succeed in doing so. Heck we're still having to argue against idiots who think racism is good, vaccines are bad, homeopathy is effective, climate change isn't real, the moon landings were a hoax, evolution is a "theory", etc. If you don't engage the idiots and slap them down then the idiots will win by default.
Unfortunately we have a lot of news media that continue to present every story as if there are two equally valid sides to every argument. THAT needs to change. But the need to fight ignorance will never end.
The FBI did not have the technical capability to access an iPhone used by one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino shooting
So what? For most of the FBI's existence they didn't have access to any iPhones at all and yet somehow they still managed to be an effective police force. It is highly unlikely that any critical evidence was on the phone that could not be gathered by any other means or that the inability to unlock the phone would result in an acquittal. It's no different than if the phone was damaged or lost. The FBI can suck it up and do some old fashioned investigating. They have access to metadata, witnesses, video, testimony, and much more. If that isn't enough it's unlikely that the iPhones will make or break the case.
With all of the knowledge and know how of the past, why did it take 50 or 60 years for access to space to drop for once?
Because getting to space is technologically hard. It takes a while for economies of scale to build up enough to really make a big difference.
It took about that long for air travel to become reasonably affordable. Heck even today an estimated 80% of the world population has never flown. When I was born less than half of the US population had never set foot inside an aircraft. The term jet set originated from the fact that until the 1960s-70s air travel was too expensive for anyone but the very wealthy.
In the beginning you are building infrastructure, but after that is done, you should be using it for its intended purpose, not as some lifelong gravy train of project contracts.
Well bear in mind that we took a 30 year wrong turn with the shuttle which delayed a lot of that infrastructure. We're just now digging out of the hole from that.
NASA has been gutted since the Obama administration when the Shuttle program was cancelled and manned space flight was handed over to the Russians.
NASA "gutted"? How do you figure? Their budget hasn't been slashed. They finally got rid of the boondoggle that was the Shuttle program. New rocket systems (public and private) are coming online. Robotic missions and science exploration has continued more or less as before. I'm puzzled how you think the Obama administration in any way "gutted" NASA.
Who cares that we are using the Russians for a few years to get people into orbit? That's a temporary situation and a far better one than the ludicrously expensive unreliable and wasteful shuttle. We wasted decades on the shuttle program when we could have been doing so much more. Any problems from that are frankly our own damn fault and happened WAY before any of the recent presidents. You have to go back to the Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan administrations for the bad planning there.
Wind & solar today still depend on fossil fuels in its life cycle.
So what? That doesn't mean they will continue to do so in perpetuity. Once solar and wind are a sufficient percentage of the supply to the grid (which seems almost inevitable) your argument vanishes in a puff of logic.
This isn't new coming from Facebook. This has happened many times before. Why is everyone scrambling to try and fix something that can't be fixed.
Sure it can. We can collectively make Facebook irrelevant/unprofitable. Ask MySpace what that looks like. Facebook will be a tough out but they aren't invincible. Facebook seems determined to explore where the line for "too far" actually lies. For me it is way behind them. Others have different opinions but everyone has a limit. Sure this new revelation isn't exactly shocking to many of us but to many people it is actually surprising. Don't overestimate how much attention people pay to corporate shenanigans.
It's not "kosher" to say this, but we really should have got back into nuclear 20 years ago.
It's not an unreasonable view point, just a politically impossible one. People are afraid of nuclear and you can't argue they are entirely wrong even if they aren't entirely well informed. It's somewhat a pity that they aren't as afraid of fossil fuels because fossil fuels are probably actually more dangerous.
The nuclear technology of today is cleaner and safer and more efficient than anything out there.
While I have no problem with using fission as a power source, no form of fission is safe. That's not even a debate. Most of the time it is fine but there is always a non-zero chance of a serious catastrophe. That's why there are so many regulations around it and why private insurance won't touch it without government guarnatees. When the people who have a profit motive to evaluate risk won't touch it that is the clearest possible evidence that it is not safe..
Nuclear fission is only "clean" in relation to fossil fuels. Nobody has come up with a workable plan for the spent fuel waste which is quite obviously not clean or safe. And because of the regulations and safety requirements around it, nuclear is not clearly more economically efficient than alternatives.
The simple fact is that nuclear is really the only energy technology that can reliably fill the growing need for energy.
That is clearly not true. Wind and solar have been shown to be able to fill a substantial portion of the need for clean energy. That is the whole point of the main article. Nuclear can (and should) be a piece of the portfolio but to pretend it is the only option is both untrue and unrealistic.
If we start using a lot less energy. Using less is the only clean energy.
Talk about a false equivalency. Yes using less is ideal. It doesn't follow that all sources of power are equally bad however. It's clear that fossil fuels are irredeemably polluting. When you need to use energy (and we all do) then you want to use the cleanest form of power generation available to you.
Facebook has been used for market research and political research for years, and people generally viewed this as a positive: finally, campaigns could figure out what people actually wanted and liked.
No people don't regard this as a positive. People are indifferent to it the vast majority of the time if they are aware at all. I doubt you would find many people that think "gee Facebook being used for market research is a good thing for me". But it usually doesn't hurt them so they don't worry about it.
All of a sudden this is a problem or a scandal? Why?
Because sometimes it takes the masses a while to realize something is bad. Sometimes it takes a company doing something unsavory at a moment when people are sensitive to it for the problem to get fully recognized. Sometimes it's just a perfect storm of circumstances coming together. Whatever the reality might be it is "all of a sudden" a problem. It's always been a problem - just not recognized as such by a many people.
Will anything come of Facebook's latest effort at being a Bond villian? I'm not optimistic. But hopefully it will be the start of some actual positive change.
Can someone familiar with these methodologies explain the criteria for statistical significance of these numbers?
Basically it's big enough to have a p value greater than 0.05 which implies statistical significance. But this doesn't mean much. Obligatory XKCD.
What is the hypothetical mechanism for low-level non-ionizing radiation to cause tumors?
They don't know and that is why nobody should get excited about this. Weird correlations happen all the time between unrelated events. Until they can show a causal mechanism for the cancer then the only conclusion you can draw from this research is that more research is warranted.
"study found a link between cell tower radiation and specific type(s) of cancer, and followup studies successfully replicated those results"
There are all kinds of weird statistical correlations that don't actually have any causal relationship. Just because they (supposedly) found a correlation does not necessarily mean cell towers cause cancer. There could easily be other factors in play or it could be experimental error or just one of those weird coincidences. Until they can detail a causal mechanism of action the only conclusion one can draw is that further study appears warranted.
I still do not understand how you know that overtreatment is not occurring.
In some cases it certainly is occurring. Sometimes this is appropriate and many others it is not. But it's a more nuanced problem than you might realize.
How do you know treatment is too aggressive?
Several ways but primarily you can compare the pathology to the treatment. If you start seeing treatment disproportionate to expectations for a given diagnosis then you have evidence that over treatment (and by extension over billing) is occurring. This is essentially a statistical evaluation. Also you or the doctor can solicit second (or third) opinions to determine whether the treatment plan is too aggressive.
Now bear in mind that erring slightly on the side of being too aggressive actually can be appropriate. For example a small percentage of appendix removals are expected to actually be unnecessary to ensure that all the ones that should be removed are. That is known and accepted as an appropriate standard of care. The symptoms that would prompt removal can be mimiced by other conditions so doctors cannot be right 100% of the time. Given that a few percent of appendix bursts are fatal, it's better to err on the side of caution. If you have a lesion on your skin that might be melanoma then it's appropriate to remove it even if the chance is small because if you are wrong it can be fatal.
A woman with a tiny lump is rushed under the knife -- lump and nearby lymph nodes are removed. She is immediate given chemo. She does not die of cancer in one year or five years. Maybe that lump was not very dangerous in the first place?
It might be benign but there is no way to know that with absolute certainty in a lot of cases. There are too many variables and unknowns for medicine to be an exact science. Almost all diagnosis are a case of playing the odds. The doctor is making an educated guess based on the probabilities. The doctor sees a lump and the pathologist tells him that 90% of the time it results in a good outcome but 10% of the time it is fatal. No way to know for certain so the proper result is to treat for the worst reasonable outcome. Similarly most of the time if your appendix bursts it will not be fatal. But standard of care is to remove it if certain symptoms appear because a small percentage of the time the outcome is seriously bad. We tend to expect certainty but the reality is that absolute certainty just isn't possible a lot of the time. There is no way to predict with absolute certainty how a dysplastic cell will grow. It's literally impossible to be certain. The best we can do is make an informed guess based on similar conditions we've observed in other patients.
Have there actually been any careful studies where patients with small lumps that are probably cancer but not necessarily dangerous, where some women are treated and some not?
Why did state funding dry up? Because the federal government came in to save the day.
What country are you living in? That's certainly not the case in the US. State schools are supported by state funding and that funding has been falling. Federal funding has not kept up so tuition has had to rise to at least partially offset the falling state support. State funding has dried up because certain members of the populace don't like taxes even when those taxes actually benefit them.
Why does education need to be funded at the federal level?
Because education is a public good that benefits us all. We live in a single country and can cross borders freely so claiming education funding and support should be restricted to the state/local level is idiotic.
Seems like education pre1980 wasn't as bad as it is now and post1980 has been characterized by disregard to meritocracy, title 9, increasing costs, and lower quality.
You might want to take off your rose colored glasses. I got much of my education pre-1980 and so I think your argument is a bogus strawman.
It makes a lot of sense to keep the engineers working on different parts of the rocket in close proximity - rather than half a continent away.
It does provided that it doesn't create a massive logistical hassle getting the finished rocket to the launch pad. Ideally you'd want the manufacturing to be as close as possible to where the rocket gets launched to keep costs low. Obviously that isn't the only consideration but its an important one. SpaceX is pretty careful about that sort of thing though so I'm fairly confident they've thought it through.
If you want some interesting reading/watching sometime check out how they got the Saturn V to the launch pad from where it was made.
And yet, CA is not only the largest manufacturer state in America, but they outdo the next 2 combined.
Not true. While California does have the most manufacturing jobs in total (hardly surprising given it has the biggest population) at around 1.2 million, the next two are Texas (840K) and Ohio (660K). And per-capita California isn't even in the top 10 either by revenue or by percent of workforce. There are WAY more manufacturing jobs in the Midwest than there are in California and the cost of living is much lower as well. Taking the states from the midwest as a group just from the top 10 they total over 2.7 million manufacturing jobs.
The fact is, that highly paid engineers would rather live in CA than.states like Texas, or Alabama, or Mississippi, or...
Ahh, the arrogance of people thinking wherever they live must be the best. Ok smart guy, explain why there are WAY more manufacturing jobs and highly paid engineers in manufacturing in the Midwest than they are in your beloved California. Explain why there are more aerospace engineering jobs with equally high wages on the East coast. California is the leading state for some types of engineering (esp computer) but other parts of the country are stronger in other areas. And Texas especially has no lack of highly paid engineers.
There is nothing wrong with California but you don't have to tear down places you don't live and know little about to make it sound better.
Colleges are also going to want to ask themselves: in this era of blisteringly high tuitions, why are so many of them "cash-strapped?"
The tuition is high because state funding has dried up substantially and because there is something of a bidding war for talent between universities. A research professor can bring in a LOT of revenue to the university but they don't come cheap. Universities make a lot of money off of research patents courtesy of the Bayh-Dole Act. Plus for a lot of schools we have one of the major parties that tends to oppose using any tax dollars to educate people - especially when the people hired with that money tend not to vote for for them.
Maybe not all manufacturing is the same? I'd imagine the clothing industry is going to be very prone to robot manufacturing
Clothing manufacturing is among the hardest industries to automate. Clothing manufacturing is among the most labor intensive industries in the world. This is why you almost invariably find clothing manufacturers to be clustered in places with extremely low labor rates. This includes making the cloth for the clothing too. Even the most automated looms require quite a lot of labor to operate.
I don't think your experience translates to the entire manufacturing industry.
The calculations for labor vs automation don't depend on what you are making. To oversimplify, you have material costs, labor hoursXrate required, and overhead / volume. Automation introduces some capital costs and reduces the labor hours. Whether or not automation makes sense depends on the size of the reduction in labor costs and how much volume you can amortize the fixed costs over. None of this depends explicitly on what sort of widget you are making.
They seem to be doing pretty well with robots despite wages and working conditions we here in America find deplorable.
Foxconn can make use of robots because of the product volume they produce. Labor is a lot cheaper in China than in the US but even so once you are making a product in the tens of millions (like an iPhone) it becomes pretty easy to justify automation. The equation is still the same but with lower labor rates it takes higher volumes to justify the automation. Foxconn seems to have achieved these.
As for working conditions, I've been to China. I've been in factories in China that make Foxconn look like a paradise. I think a lot of this will solve itself as China's economy grows but it's going to be kind of a shit sandwich for a lot of factory workers until then.
The point of the article is that automation is going to hit the developing country (e.g. the ones without the stuff you're citing) hard.
And my point is that the impact of automation tends to be grossly overstated. Especially here on slashdot. I work with automation. In a few hours I'm going to be at work picking out tooling for an automated stamping press. I could easily see some countries in Africa competing in my industry. Right now if we need high volume production on a labor intensive product that business will go to someplace like Honduras or China. But Africa could easily get into the game because it is technically extremely difficult to automate certain assembly tasks. For example try to automate a machine to untwist cat 5 wire, sort the wire colors, insert into a connector and crimp. It can be done but not cheaply so it is almost always done by a human. Even an uneducated human with no previous experience can be taught to do this in minutes and doesn't require any upfront capital costs or expensive tools or engineers or maintenance. Developing a machine cheap enough to replace people for this job will be extremely challenging.
Not if you take into account shipping to the US. If you want to sell in Africa, you'll produce in Africa, but if you want to sell in the US, you'll produce in the US.
Sorry but it's not remotely that simple. US labor is among the most expensive in the world so labor intensive goods tend to be produced elsewhere, even for items consumed by the US. But even that doesn't capture it all. Supply chain location matters too. East Asia dominates electronics manufacturing in large part because that is where the supply chain is located. It's FAR cheaper to make the products there and then ship them to the US in most cases and that isn't really a function of labor rates for the most part. Japanese labor isn't much cheaper than US labor but Japan exports a huge amount of stuff to the US. Conversely the US has a HUGE export sector too even though the US is a net consumer.
you frequently need to ship the raw materials from somewhere, but producing at either the material source or the selling destination is cheaper than involving a third intermediary location for production.
The calculation isn't that simple. It depends on relative labor rates, tariffs, exchange rates, local supply chains, infrastructure, lead times, communication costs, administrative costs, and a host of other considerations. All other things being equal you would be right but things are rarely equal like that.
Within less than two decades it will be cheaper to operate robots in US factories than hire workers in Africa
Speaking as someone who runs a manufacturing plant and who has bought robots, this is complete bullshit. Anyone who actually believes this has no idea of the costs involved or the capabilities of robots or manufacturing automation. There is PLENTY of headroom in labor intensive industries for people to be employed in manufacturing including in Africa. Robots simply are not that cheap or capable and are in no danger of becoming so any time soon for most tasks.
Robots are economically viable for high volume and/or dangerous work. They are not nearly as flexible or capable as many people imagine them to be and they certainly aren't cheap. There are some industries and products where they make a lot of sense and many more (especially low volume production) where they are not economically viable. Most automation actually doesn't come in robot form either for that matter.
The problem Africa has in getting into manufacturing comes in several parts. 1) A lot of corruption, 2) extremely bad infrastructure, 3) An inexperienced talent pool for workers. All these are solvable problems but aren't easy ones either. Automation is far down the list of obstacles to manufacturing in Africa.
You are confusing oncologist with pathologist. Pathologists study existing samples for existing conditions.
I'm married to a pathologist and I've worked in and around pathology labs. I assure you that there is no confusion here about what they do. You on the other hand are not actually well informed about what pathologists actually do as evidenced by your comments.
Oncologist is the one that "gazes into the future" to figure out the optimal treatment.
All doctors have to make guesses based on probabilities. The reason we have specialists like pathologists is that medicine is a team activity and you need multiple experts to get the diagnosis in many cases. It's no different than ER doctor calling in a cardiac specialist or a psychiatrist. Pathologists "gaze into the future" to try to predict whether a cell will grow in a manner that will adversely affect the health of the patient. When a pathologist gives a "benign" diagnosis he/she is saying that they do not expect it to be a health risk. If they says something is "malignant" then they are predicting it will be harmful. When they stage and grade lesions they are giving a statistical guess as to the likely course of the disease and the treatments that might be required. It is a guess about the future course of the disease. They have no way to know for certain. It's just an educated guess. Sometimes they are wrong. The reason some diseases like melanoma are so dangerous is that they sometimes mimic benign disease processes.
Now many disease processes cannot be diagnosed by pathology alone or by clinical impression alone. In many cases the diagnosis requires a clinical correlation with pathology so it is de-facto a joint diagnosis and often a joint treatment plan as well. Pathologists routinely prompt treatment modalities through their reports which clinicians ignore at their peril. In their reports they will tell the clinician (in their lingo) "you should cut this lesion out" or "I think this is harmless so no treatment is necessary". While it is the responsibility of the clinician to decide on the treatment, I can assure you that they are heavily guided by the recommendations of the pathologist which often will include recommendations of clinical treatments. If the clinician decides to ignore the pathologists recommendations and things go badly the first thing a lawyer will do is ask why they ignored the pathology report. When a pathologists writes "excision is recommended" that is the pathologist treating the patient and is effectively an order to the clinician to remove tissue. The fact that they aren't holding the scalpel is irrelevant and it is unlikely that such a recommendation will be ignored.
One is the doctor who's job is solely to analyse the sample for existing conditions
You are misinformed as to what a pathologist actually does. Pathologists not only examine tissue for disease processes they also indicate recommendations for treatment as well as a act as reference for potential alternative diagnosis. My wife is asked by the clinicians she works with daily for what she recommends as treatment. (usually a decision regarding whether to surgically remove more tissue) They treat the patient every bit as much as the clinician does and they provide specialist information that would be otherwise unavailable to the clinician.
Other is the doctor that formulates the diagnosis based on, among other things, pathologist's report and then formulate the treatment plan.
Both pathologist and clinicians provide diagnoses and they both matter. Usually the clinician's diagnosis is heavily informed by the pathologist's diagnosis. The clinician does decide on the treatment modality but pathologists routinely tell clinicians what to do. If a pathologist tells a clinician that the diagnosis is melanoma the pathologist is perfectly well aware of what the standard of care for that is and what will
Accuracy of diagnosis. In case of a pathologist, this isn't about curing people. It's about being correct in one's diagnosis of potentially having specific kinds of cancer.
Careful there. The "correct" diagnosis is only found out by the disease process evolving. What pathologists are trying to find is the diagnosis that meets the standard of care based on the available evidence. Pathologists are essentially being asked to gaze into the future and guess how a disease process will progress. They never have enough information to be right 100% of the time. Its a little like predicting the weather in that regard. So you evaluate pathologist performance by their accuracy in relation to other pathologists looking at the same case with the same information. What you want is the guy with the highest percentage of being right but nobody is going to be right 100% of the time.
You take one sample, split it in two, get a doctor you want to test analyse one sample, get other analysed by trusted expert/panel of experts. Do that across notable amount of samples. You now have success rate for this specific pathologist.
This is done all the time. It's a requirement for accreditation of laboratories not to mention to avoid lawsuits. Difficult cases cases routinely get shown to multiple pathologists even in cases when they aren't trying to track success rates.
I am very skeptical whether we have any idea who is a good pathologist and who is a bad one.
We do. Pathologists tend to have their work checked a lot (plus it's an accreditation requirement) so other pathologists tend to have a pretty good idea who is good and who isn't. (I know this because my wife is a pathologist) There also is a lot of clinical outcome data out there so it's pretty easy to correlate that to accuracy in diagnosis in pathology. Also if you want to know who is a good clinician the best person to ask is often a pathologist because they get to see the clinicians work. If you want to know who is a good surgeon and who isn't, a pathologist can be the best person to ask.
What you should worry about in pathology though isn't so much whether a given pathologist is good or not but what their incentives are. Like most doctors pathologists are compensated piece rate. Meaning the more cases they look at the more they get paid. There is little to no incentive (aside from avoiding lawsuits) to spend extra time on difficult cases so many of the larger labs crank through ridiculous numbers of cases. This necessarily means that they aren't giving every case their full attention and capability. There should be stronger incentives for outcome based rather than piece rate based compensation. Some labs like my wife's work more carefully but this makes them less profitable.
One important thing to bear in mind is that NO pathologist or doctor of any kind is right 100% of the time. They will make mistakes and there are cases where it will be impossible to get the right diagnosis. It's a bit like playing poker. You make you best guess based on imperfect information and sometimes you're going to get beat because there was something you didn't know.
5. The diagnosis is made. For this until now you need a specialized pathologist with many years of experience and very expensive training to look at the photos and give you his opinion of whether this is cancer he's looking at in the photos or not. Or apparently now you can use a computer program to check out the photos and give you an almost equally accurate opinion.
It's not really like that when you get into the details. My wife is a pathologist. First off anatomic pathologists do not look at photos as a general proposition. They look at slides under a microscope for the most part. There are some pathology imaging systems but they are not in widespread use currently for both cost and technical reasons. It turns out to be technically challenging and expensive in many cases to make an image of every slide with sufficient detail to be useful - it's cheaper and more flexible to just look at the slide directly under a microscope in most cases. Imaging systems will become more common in time but there are a lot of technical issues to work out first.
There are two types of pathology. Clinical pathology and anatomic pathology. Clinical pathology is what is done with stuff like blood draws. It's sent to a lab where the tissue sample is run through some expensive machines which spit out a computer report. You've probably seen some of these. Anatomic pathologists on the other hand deal in tissue samples that result from surgeries or from biopsies. The tissue sample is sent to a lab where it is usually embedded in wax, stained, and then looked at under a microscope to render a diagnosis. This diagnosis is generally based on morphology as well as information gained from molecular and chemical stains. In essence it is pattern matching. In time anatomic pathology will likely come to resemble clinical pathology more and more. However this does not mean the need for the pathologist will go away. It just will mean that their job will involve managing automation and interpreting the results. There are many cases where the results are ambiguous and a human expert will remain necessary to reconcile the problems and interact with the various clinicians to ensure the proper course of treatment occurs.
It is important to understand that the important word in your comment is "opinion". Diagnosis is not binary. Disease criteria are not nearly as well defined as you and I would like them to be. The difference between "mild dysplasia" and "severe dysplasia" is often more of a gestalt thing than a function of rigorous criteria but it can have significant clinical implications (surgery versus no surgery or chemo vs watch and wait). In a lot of diseases there isn't sufficient evidence available to have useful gradations relating to clinical outcomes. It's getting better all the time but there is a lot that is unknown. What the pathologist is doing is essentially making an educated guess based on morphology and other evidence as to what disease processes could be going on. In essence they are being asked to predict how a bit of tissue will grow in the future. They are building a differential diagnosis and explaining which diagnosis they favor and why. Computers can do this and in some cases they can be really helpful in ensuring the differential is complete. But there also will always be those weird and difficult cases which is where it is unlikely the need for humans will go away. Automation will be very helpful to anatomic pathology but it's not going to replace human pathologist any time soon. It will just make them more efficient and (hopefully) reduce costs. What will happen is the computer will spit out a report with some results and a differential but the pathologist will examine the report and interpret it in the
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There are efficiency losses throughout that entire conversion cycle. The only clean way to minimize those efficiency losses is to use less energy.
We're going to utilize energy. Your argument is null and void if you pretend otherwise. Yes using less is optimal but not realistic with a growing and economically advancing civilization. Your argument is akin to a company trying to endlessly cut expenses to become profitable. It works to a point but then it becomes counterproductive. We're not going to all go back to living in caves with no electricity, no plumbing, and no transportation. If you want to go off grid and live in the woods knock yourself out. The rest of us will be living here in the real world where we have an optimization problem.
Continuing to discuss this topic just plays into the hands of people who want to take your rights away.
If you don't discuss the topic then the people who want to remove your rights will succeed in doing so. Heck we're still having to argue against idiots who think racism is good, vaccines are bad, homeopathy is effective, climate change isn't real, the moon landings were a hoax, evolution is a "theory", etc. If you don't engage the idiots and slap them down then the idiots will win by default.
Unfortunately we have a lot of news media that continue to present every story as if there are two equally valid sides to every argument. THAT needs to change. But the need to fight ignorance will never end.
The FBI did not have the technical capability to access an iPhone used by one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino shooting
So what? For most of the FBI's existence they didn't have access to any iPhones at all and yet somehow they still managed to be an effective police force. It is highly unlikely that any critical evidence was on the phone that could not be gathered by any other means or that the inability to unlock the phone would result in an acquittal. It's no different than if the phone was damaged or lost. The FBI can suck it up and do some old fashioned investigating. They have access to metadata, witnesses, video, testimony, and much more. If that isn't enough it's unlikely that the iPhones will make or break the case.
With all of the knowledge and know how of the past, why did it take 50 or 60 years for access to space to drop for once?
Because getting to space is technologically hard. It takes a while for economies of scale to build up enough to really make a big difference.
It took about that long for air travel to become reasonably affordable. Heck even today an estimated 80% of the world population has never flown. When I was born less than half of the US population had never set foot inside an aircraft. The term jet set originated from the fact that until the 1960s-70s air travel was too expensive for anyone but the very wealthy.
In the beginning you are building infrastructure, but after that is done, you should be using it for its intended purpose, not as some lifelong gravy train of project contracts.
Well bear in mind that we took a 30 year wrong turn with the shuttle which delayed a lot of that infrastructure. We're just now digging out of the hole from that.
NASA has been gutted since the Obama administration when the Shuttle program was cancelled and manned space flight was handed over to the Russians.
NASA "gutted"? How do you figure? Their budget hasn't been slashed. They finally got rid of the boondoggle that was the Shuttle program. New rocket systems (public and private) are coming online. Robotic missions and science exploration has continued more or less as before. I'm puzzled how you think the Obama administration in any way "gutted" NASA.
Who cares that we are using the Russians for a few years to get people into orbit? That's a temporary situation and a far better one than the ludicrously expensive unreliable and wasteful shuttle. We wasted decades on the shuttle program when we could have been doing so much more. Any problems from that are frankly our own damn fault and happened WAY before any of the recent presidents. You have to go back to the Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan administrations for the bad planning there.
Wind & solar today still depend on fossil fuels in its life cycle.
So what? That doesn't mean they will continue to do so in perpetuity. Once solar and wind are a sufficient percentage of the supply to the grid (which seems almost inevitable) your argument vanishes in a puff of logic.
This isn't new coming from Facebook. This has happened many times before. Why is everyone scrambling to try and fix something that can't be fixed.
Sure it can. We can collectively make Facebook irrelevant/unprofitable. Ask MySpace what that looks like. Facebook will be a tough out but they aren't invincible. Facebook seems determined to explore where the line for "too far" actually lies. For me it is way behind them. Others have different opinions but everyone has a limit. Sure this new revelation isn't exactly shocking to many of us but to many people it is actually surprising. Don't overestimate how much attention people pay to corporate shenanigans.
It's not "kosher" to say this, but we really should have got back into nuclear 20 years ago.
It's not an unreasonable view point, just a politically impossible one. People are afraid of nuclear and you can't argue they are entirely wrong even if they aren't entirely well informed. It's somewhat a pity that they aren't as afraid of fossil fuels because fossil fuels are probably actually more dangerous.
The nuclear technology of today is cleaner and safer and more efficient than anything out there.
While I have no problem with using fission as a power source, no form of fission is safe. That's not even a debate. Most of the time it is fine but there is always a non-zero chance of a serious catastrophe. That's why there are so many regulations around it and why private insurance won't touch it without government guarnatees. When the people who have a profit motive to evaluate risk won't touch it that is the clearest possible evidence that it is not safe..
Nuclear fission is only "clean" in relation to fossil fuels. Nobody has come up with a workable plan for the spent fuel waste which is quite obviously not clean or safe. And because of the regulations and safety requirements around it, nuclear is not clearly more economically efficient than alternatives.
The simple fact is that nuclear is really the only energy technology that can reliably fill the growing need for energy.
That is clearly not true. Wind and solar have been shown to be able to fill a substantial portion of the need for clean energy. That is the whole point of the main article. Nuclear can (and should) be a piece of the portfolio but to pretend it is the only option is both untrue and unrealistic.
If we start using a lot less energy. Using less is the only clean energy.
Talk about a false equivalency. Yes using less is ideal. It doesn't follow that all sources of power are equally bad however. It's clear that fossil fuels are irredeemably polluting. When you need to use energy (and we all do) then you want to use the cleanest form of power generation available to you.
Facebook has been used for market research and political research for years, and people generally viewed this as a positive: finally, campaigns could figure out what people actually wanted and liked.
No people don't regard this as a positive. People are indifferent to it the vast majority of the time if they are aware at all. I doubt you would find many people that think "gee Facebook being used for market research is a good thing for me". But it usually doesn't hurt them so they don't worry about it.
All of a sudden this is a problem or a scandal? Why?
Because sometimes it takes the masses a while to realize something is bad. Sometimes it takes a company doing something unsavory at a moment when people are sensitive to it for the problem to get fully recognized. Sometimes it's just a perfect storm of circumstances coming together. Whatever the reality might be it is "all of a sudden" a problem. It's always been a problem - just not recognized as such by a many people.
Will anything come of Facebook's latest effort at being a Bond villian? I'm not optimistic. But hopefully it will be the start of some actual positive change.
Can someone familiar with these methodologies explain the criteria for statistical significance of these numbers?
Basically it's big enough to have a p value greater than 0.05 which implies statistical significance. But this doesn't mean much. Obligatory XKCD.
What is the hypothetical mechanism for low-level non-ionizing radiation to cause tumors?
They don't know and that is why nobody should get excited about this. Weird correlations happen all the time between unrelated events. Until they can show a causal mechanism for the cancer then the only conclusion you can draw from this research is that more research is warranted.
"study found a link between cell tower radiation and specific type(s) of cancer, and followup studies successfully replicated those results"
There are all kinds of weird statistical correlations that don't actually have any causal relationship. Just because they (supposedly) found a correlation does not necessarily mean cell towers cause cancer. There could easily be other factors in play or it could be experimental error or just one of those weird coincidences. Until they can detail a causal mechanism of action the only conclusion one can draw is that further study appears warranted.
I still do not understand how you know that overtreatment is not occurring.
In some cases it certainly is occurring. Sometimes this is appropriate and many others it is not. But it's a more nuanced problem than you might realize.
How do you know treatment is too aggressive?
Several ways but primarily you can compare the pathology to the treatment. If you start seeing treatment disproportionate to expectations for a given diagnosis then you have evidence that over treatment (and by extension over billing) is occurring. This is essentially a statistical evaluation. Also you or the doctor can solicit second (or third) opinions to determine whether the treatment plan is too aggressive.
Now bear in mind that erring slightly on the side of being too aggressive actually can be appropriate. For example a small percentage of appendix removals are expected to actually be unnecessary to ensure that all the ones that should be removed are. That is known and accepted as an appropriate standard of care. The symptoms that would prompt removal can be mimiced by other conditions so doctors cannot be right 100% of the time. Given that a few percent of appendix bursts are fatal, it's better to err on the side of caution. If you have a lesion on your skin that might be melanoma then it's appropriate to remove it even if the chance is small because if you are wrong it can be fatal.
A woman with a tiny lump is rushed under the knife -- lump and nearby lymph nodes are removed. She is immediate given chemo. She does not die of cancer in one year or five years. Maybe that lump was not very dangerous in the first place?
It might be benign but there is no way to know that with absolute certainty in a lot of cases. There are too many variables and unknowns for medicine to be an exact science. Almost all diagnosis are a case of playing the odds. The doctor is making an educated guess based on the probabilities. The doctor sees a lump and the pathologist tells him that 90% of the time it results in a good outcome but 10% of the time it is fatal. No way to know for certain so the proper result is to treat for the worst reasonable outcome. Similarly most of the time if your appendix bursts it will not be fatal. But standard of care is to remove it if certain symptoms appear because a small percentage of the time the outcome is seriously bad. We tend to expect certainty but the reality is that absolute certainty just isn't possible a lot of the time. There is no way to predict with absolute certainty how a dysplastic cell will grow. It's literally impossible to be certain. The best we can do is make an informed guess based on similar conditions we've observed in other patients.
Have there actually been any careful studies where patients with small lumps that are probably cancer but not necessarily dangerous, where some women are treated and some not?
Plenty of them. It's a well studied issue.
Why did state funding dry up? Because the federal government came in to save the day.
What country are you living in? That's certainly not the case in the US. State schools are supported by state funding and that funding has been falling. Federal funding has not kept up so tuition has had to rise to at least partially offset the falling state support. State funding has dried up because certain members of the populace don't like taxes even when those taxes actually benefit them.
Why does education need to be funded at the federal level?
Because education is a public good that benefits us all. We live in a single country and can cross borders freely so claiming education funding and support should be restricted to the state/local level is idiotic.
Seems like education pre1980 wasn't as bad as it is now and post1980 has been characterized by disregard to meritocracy, title 9, increasing costs, and lower quality.
You might want to take off your rose colored glasses. I got much of my education pre-1980 and so I think your argument is a bogus strawman.
It makes a lot of sense to keep the engineers working on different parts of the rocket in close proximity - rather than half a continent away.
It does provided that it doesn't create a massive logistical hassle getting the finished rocket to the launch pad. Ideally you'd want the manufacturing to be as close as possible to where the rocket gets launched to keep costs low. Obviously that isn't the only consideration but its an important one. SpaceX is pretty careful about that sort of thing though so I'm fairly confident they've thought it through.
If you want some interesting reading/watching sometime check out how they got the Saturn V to the launch pad from where it was made.
And yet, CA is not only the largest manufacturer state in America, but they outdo the next 2 combined.
Not true. While California does have the most manufacturing jobs in total (hardly surprising given it has the biggest population) at around 1.2 million, the next two are Texas (840K) and Ohio (660K). And per-capita California isn't even in the top 10 either by revenue or by percent of workforce. There are WAY more manufacturing jobs in the Midwest than there are in California and the cost of living is much lower as well. Taking the states from the midwest as a group just from the top 10 they total over 2.7 million manufacturing jobs.
The fact is, that highly paid engineers would rather live in CA than.states like Texas, or Alabama, or Mississippi, or ...
Ahh, the arrogance of people thinking wherever they live must be the best. Ok smart guy, explain why there are WAY more manufacturing jobs and highly paid engineers in manufacturing in the Midwest than they are in your beloved California. Explain why there are more aerospace engineering jobs with equally high wages on the East coast. California is the leading state for some types of engineering (esp computer) but other parts of the country are stronger in other areas. And Texas especially has no lack of highly paid engineers.
There is nothing wrong with California but you don't have to tear down places you don't live and know little about to make it sound better.
Colleges are also going to want to ask themselves: in this era of blisteringly high tuitions, why are so many of them "cash-strapped?"
The tuition is high because state funding has dried up substantially and because there is something of a bidding war for talent between universities. A research professor can bring in a LOT of revenue to the university but they don't come cheap. Universities make a lot of money off of research patents courtesy of the Bayh-Dole Act. Plus for a lot of schools we have one of the major parties that tends to oppose using any tax dollars to educate people - especially when the people hired with that money tend not to vote for for them.
Maybe not all manufacturing is the same? I'd imagine the clothing industry is going to be very prone to robot manufacturing
Clothing manufacturing is among the hardest industries to automate. Clothing manufacturing is among the most labor intensive industries in the world. This is why you almost invariably find clothing manufacturers to be clustered in places with extremely low labor rates. This includes making the cloth for the clothing too. Even the most automated looms require quite a lot of labor to operate.
I don't think your experience translates to the entire manufacturing industry.
The calculations for labor vs automation don't depend on what you are making. To oversimplify, you have material costs, labor hoursXrate required, and overhead / volume. Automation introduces some capital costs and reduces the labor hours. Whether or not automation makes sense depends on the size of the reduction in labor costs and how much volume you can amortize the fixed costs over. None of this depends explicitly on what sort of widget you are making.
They seem to be doing pretty well with robots despite wages and working conditions we here in America find deplorable.
Foxconn can make use of robots because of the product volume they produce. Labor is a lot cheaper in China than in the US but even so once you are making a product in the tens of millions (like an iPhone) it becomes pretty easy to justify automation. The equation is still the same but with lower labor rates it takes higher volumes to justify the automation. Foxconn seems to have achieved these.
As for working conditions, I've been to China. I've been in factories in China that make Foxconn look like a paradise. I think a lot of this will solve itself as China's economy grows but it's going to be kind of a shit sandwich for a lot of factory workers until then.
The point of the article is that automation is going to hit the developing country (e.g. the ones without the stuff you're citing) hard.
And my point is that the impact of automation tends to be grossly overstated. Especially here on slashdot. I work with automation. In a few hours I'm going to be at work picking out tooling for an automated stamping press. I could easily see some countries in Africa competing in my industry. Right now if we need high volume production on a labor intensive product that business will go to someplace like Honduras or China. But Africa could easily get into the game because it is technically extremely difficult to automate certain assembly tasks. For example try to automate a machine to untwist cat 5 wire, sort the wire colors, insert into a connector and crimp. It can be done but not cheaply so it is almost always done by a human. Even an uneducated human with no previous experience can be taught to do this in minutes and doesn't require any upfront capital costs or expensive tools or engineers or maintenance. Developing a machine cheap enough to replace people for this job will be extremely challenging.
Not if you take into account shipping to the US. If you want to sell in Africa, you'll produce in Africa, but if you want to sell in the US, you'll produce in the US.
Sorry but it's not remotely that simple. US labor is among the most expensive in the world so labor intensive goods tend to be produced elsewhere, even for items consumed by the US. But even that doesn't capture it all. Supply chain location matters too. East Asia dominates electronics manufacturing in large part because that is where the supply chain is located. It's FAR cheaper to make the products there and then ship them to the US in most cases and that isn't really a function of labor rates for the most part. Japanese labor isn't much cheaper than US labor but Japan exports a huge amount of stuff to the US. Conversely the US has a HUGE export sector too even though the US is a net consumer.
you frequently need to ship the raw materials from somewhere, but producing at either the material source or the selling destination is cheaper than involving a third intermediary location for production.
The calculation isn't that simple. It depends on relative labor rates, tariffs, exchange rates, local supply chains, infrastructure, lead times, communication costs, administrative costs, and a host of other considerations. All other things being equal you would be right but things are rarely equal like that.
Within less than two decades it will be cheaper to operate robots in US factories than hire workers in Africa
Speaking as someone who runs a manufacturing plant and who has bought robots, this is complete bullshit. Anyone who actually believes this has no idea of the costs involved or the capabilities of robots or manufacturing automation. There is PLENTY of headroom in labor intensive industries for people to be employed in manufacturing including in Africa. Robots simply are not that cheap or capable and are in no danger of becoming so any time soon for most tasks.
Robots are economically viable for high volume and/or dangerous work. They are not nearly as flexible or capable as many people imagine them to be and they certainly aren't cheap. There are some industries and products where they make a lot of sense and many more (especially low volume production) where they are not economically viable. Most automation actually doesn't come in robot form either for that matter.
The problem Africa has in getting into manufacturing comes in several parts. 1) A lot of corruption, 2) extremely bad infrastructure, 3) An inexperienced talent pool for workers. All these are solvable problems but aren't easy ones either. Automation is far down the list of obstacles to manufacturing in Africa.
You are confusing oncologist with pathologist. Pathologists study existing samples for existing conditions.
I'm married to a pathologist and I've worked in and around pathology labs. I assure you that there is no confusion here about what they do. You on the other hand are not actually well informed about what pathologists actually do as evidenced by your comments.
Oncologist is the one that "gazes into the future" to figure out the optimal treatment.
All doctors have to make guesses based on probabilities. The reason we have specialists like pathologists is that medicine is a team activity and you need multiple experts to get the diagnosis in many cases. It's no different than ER doctor calling in a cardiac specialist or a psychiatrist. Pathologists "gaze into the future" to try to predict whether a cell will grow in a manner that will adversely affect the health of the patient. When a pathologist gives a "benign" diagnosis he/she is saying that they do not expect it to be a health risk. If they says something is "malignant" then they are predicting it will be harmful. When they stage and grade lesions they are giving a statistical guess as to the likely course of the disease and the treatments that might be required. It is a guess about the future course of the disease. They have no way to know for certain. It's just an educated guess. Sometimes they are wrong. The reason some diseases like melanoma are so dangerous is that they sometimes mimic benign disease processes.
Now many disease processes cannot be diagnosed by pathology alone or by clinical impression alone. In many cases the diagnosis requires a clinical correlation with pathology so it is de-facto a joint diagnosis and often a joint treatment plan as well. Pathologists routinely prompt treatment modalities through their reports which clinicians ignore at their peril. In their reports they will tell the clinician (in their lingo) "you should cut this lesion out" or "I think this is harmless so no treatment is necessary". While it is the responsibility of the clinician to decide on the treatment, I can assure you that they are heavily guided by the recommendations of the pathologist which often will include recommendations of clinical treatments. If the clinician decides to ignore the pathologists recommendations and things go badly the first thing a lawyer will do is ask why they ignored the pathology report. When a pathologists writes "excision is recommended" that is the pathologist treating the patient and is effectively an order to the clinician to remove tissue. The fact that they aren't holding the scalpel is irrelevant and it is unlikely that such a recommendation will be ignored.
One is the doctor who's job is solely to analyse the sample for existing conditions
You are misinformed as to what a pathologist actually does. Pathologists not only examine tissue for disease processes they also indicate recommendations for treatment as well as a act as reference for potential alternative diagnosis. My wife is asked by the clinicians she works with daily for what she recommends as treatment. (usually a decision regarding whether to surgically remove more tissue) They treat the patient every bit as much as the clinician does and they provide specialist information that would be otherwise unavailable to the clinician.
Other is the doctor that formulates the diagnosis based on, among other things, pathologist's report and then formulate the treatment plan.
Both pathologist and clinicians provide diagnoses and they both matter. Usually the clinician's diagnosis is heavily informed by the pathologist's diagnosis. The clinician does decide on the treatment modality but pathologists routinely tell clinicians what to do. If a pathologist tells a clinician that the diagnosis is melanoma the pathologist is perfectly well aware of what the standard of care for that is and what will
Accuracy of diagnosis. In case of a pathologist, this isn't about curing people. It's about being correct in one's diagnosis of potentially having specific kinds of cancer.
Careful there. The "correct" diagnosis is only found out by the disease process evolving. What pathologists are trying to find is the diagnosis that meets the standard of care based on the available evidence. Pathologists are essentially being asked to gaze into the future and guess how a disease process will progress. They never have enough information to be right 100% of the time. Its a little like predicting the weather in that regard. So you evaluate pathologist performance by their accuracy in relation to other pathologists looking at the same case with the same information. What you want is the guy with the highest percentage of being right but nobody is going to be right 100% of the time.
You take one sample, split it in two, get a doctor you want to test analyse one sample, get other analysed by trusted expert/panel of experts. Do that across notable amount of samples. You now have success rate for this specific pathologist.
This is done all the time. It's a requirement for accreditation of laboratories not to mention to avoid lawsuits. Difficult cases cases routinely get shown to multiple pathologists even in cases when they aren't trying to track success rates.
I am very skeptical whether we have any idea who is a good pathologist and who is a bad one.
We do. Pathologists tend to have their work checked a lot (plus it's an accreditation requirement) so other pathologists tend to have a pretty good idea who is good and who isn't. (I know this because my wife is a pathologist) There also is a lot of clinical outcome data out there so it's pretty easy to correlate that to accuracy in diagnosis in pathology. Also if you want to know who is a good clinician the best person to ask is often a pathologist because they get to see the clinicians work. If you want to know who is a good surgeon and who isn't, a pathologist can be the best person to ask.
What you should worry about in pathology though isn't so much whether a given pathologist is good or not but what their incentives are. Like most doctors pathologists are compensated piece rate. Meaning the more cases they look at the more they get paid. There is little to no incentive (aside from avoiding lawsuits) to spend extra time on difficult cases so many of the larger labs crank through ridiculous numbers of cases. This necessarily means that they aren't giving every case their full attention and capability. There should be stronger incentives for outcome based rather than piece rate based compensation. Some labs like my wife's work more carefully but this makes them less profitable.
One important thing to bear in mind is that NO pathologist or doctor of any kind is right 100% of the time. They will make mistakes and there are cases where it will be impossible to get the right diagnosis. It's a bit like playing poker. You make you best guess based on imperfect information and sometimes you're going to get beat because there was something you didn't know.
5. The diagnosis is made. For this until now you need a specialized pathologist with many years of experience and very expensive training to look at the photos and give you his opinion of whether this is cancer he's looking at in the photos or not. Or apparently now you can use a computer program to check out the photos and give you an almost equally accurate opinion.
It's not really like that when you get into the details. My wife is a pathologist. First off anatomic pathologists do not look at photos as a general proposition. They look at slides under a microscope for the most part. There are some pathology imaging systems but they are not in widespread use currently for both cost and technical reasons. It turns out to be technically challenging and expensive in many cases to make an image of every slide with sufficient detail to be useful - it's cheaper and more flexible to just look at the slide directly under a microscope in most cases. Imaging systems will become more common in time but there are a lot of technical issues to work out first.
There are two types of pathology. Clinical pathology and anatomic pathology. Clinical pathology is what is done with stuff like blood draws. It's sent to a lab where the tissue sample is run through some expensive machines which spit out a computer report. You've probably seen some of these. Anatomic pathologists on the other hand deal in tissue samples that result from surgeries or from biopsies. The tissue sample is sent to a lab where it is usually embedded in wax, stained, and then looked at under a microscope to render a diagnosis. This diagnosis is generally based on morphology as well as information gained from molecular and chemical stains. In essence it is pattern matching. In time anatomic pathology will likely come to resemble clinical pathology more and more. However this does not mean the need for the pathologist will go away. It just will mean that their job will involve managing automation and interpreting the results. There are many cases where the results are ambiguous and a human expert will remain necessary to reconcile the problems and interact with the various clinicians to ensure the proper course of treatment occurs.
It is important to understand that the important word in your comment is "opinion". Diagnosis is not binary. Disease criteria are not nearly as well defined as you and I would like them to be. The difference between "mild dysplasia" and "severe dysplasia" is often more of a gestalt thing than a function of rigorous criteria but it can have significant clinical implications (surgery versus no surgery or chemo vs watch and wait). In a lot of diseases there isn't sufficient evidence available to have useful gradations relating to clinical outcomes. It's getting better all the time but there is a lot that is unknown. What the pathologist is doing is essentially making an educated guess based on morphology and other evidence as to what disease processes could be going on. In essence they are being asked to predict how a bit of tissue will grow in the future. They are building a differential diagnosis and explaining which diagnosis they favor and why. Computers can do this and in some cases they can be really helpful in ensuring the differential is complete. But there also will always be those weird and difficult cases which is where it is unlikely the need for humans will go away. Automation will be very helpful to anatomic pathology but it's not going to replace human pathologist any time soon. It will just make them more efficient and (hopefully) reduce costs. What will happen is the computer will spit out a report with some results and a differential but the pathologist will examine the report and interpret it in the