The FDA is currently groping with how to approve fecal implants to treat intestinal infections; they should be able to figure out phage as well.
I can think of one good reason to bring it to the public though: if all of your patients are screaming and ready to sue you over every hygiene violation you might just wash your hands every time you are supposed to and sterilize the @#$# out of your hospital.
Actually the big benefit of not having used antibiotics (recently) is that your intestines are still full of the normal collection of helpful bacteria, as opposed to having them wiped out and providing no competition for pathogenic bacteria like C. diff., which is currently the most common cause of antibiotic resistant death.
Most of the deaths (14,000 out of 23,000 deaths caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the US) aren't due to skin infections, they are due to C. difficile intestinal infections acquired in hospitals. Starts out as colitis and then you shit yourself to death, infecting lots of other people in the hospital along the way.
By the time I was 15 I started to meet people who absolutely hate Monty Python. My unofficial poll found that most of the haters had their first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth... and fifty first exposures to MP via acquaintances who repeated fragments of the jokes and sketches to them. That's as far as I got though: never found out why they hate Monty Python.
I'm ecstatic just to avoid crawling in stop and go traffic when driving in LA, let alone cruising at 70mph. Do you do most of your driving between 3-5AM on sundays?
I think you could pile Sarbanes-Oxley on top of that. CEOs/CFOs have to certify that their companies' public financial statements and disclosures are true so that they don't mislead their investors. Forcing them to lie on an issue that could have a big financial impact on the company (say they are a cloud storage company) should get the lobbyists into gear...
Would it be possible to create a "canary" so that falsifying it breaks SEC laws, fiduciary relationships, and other laws? Cooperating with NSA surveillance (and having the cooperation revealed) can clearly affect a company's bottom line; deliberately misleading shareholders on that point would normally be actionable. I'd guess it would go to courts that would eventually find the Patriot Act trumps everything else, but that would take some time and meanwhile the legal wrangling might get leaked...
It's a way to turn coal (burned to manufacture ethanol from corn in the US) and diesel (ag and transportation trucks) BTUs into ethanol BTUs, and urban dollars into farm dollars.
Sta-bil has been around a long time. Keeping the alcohol from separating out helps some of the corrosion issues, though clearing out all of the fuel is better. Your lawnmower will definitely thank you for either emptying it or putting in sta-bil for the winter.
California set up a law to reward companies who spent substantial R&D money qualifying for the law, then changed the law at the last minute to take away the reward. But they still wanted the benefit of the R&D those companies did. GM wasn't having any of that, and if they weren't going to profit from developing the EV1, then neither was California.
Hogwash.
1. GM and the other car companies played the Zero Emissions environmentalists against the people who wanted fleet averages. The ZEV mandate allowed them to continue to sell their most profitable vehicles without worrying about mileage.
2. The resulting mandate for a percentage of the market to be ZEVs was easily recognizable as unenforceable as written: CA politicians weren't going run for re-election while the cars, SUVs, and pickups their constituents wanted to buy were being banned. A mandate based on incremental fines and fleet averages would have been much harder to kill if it had been enacted. That's the reason car companies chose to let the ZEV mandate pass: not because they planned on meeting it, but because it would be easier to kill later on
3. The cave in on the ZEV mandate was completely predictable, especially to GM which lobbied to kill it. Why would GM have sought to delay and finally kill the mandate if it would have given them a competitive advantage? GM could never have met the mandate, wasn't planning to, and neither could any of the other manufacturers.
4. GM's billion dollar investment in R&D was well subsidized by the ~50% R&D tax credit and research grants. It was also great PR at a time when their profit center (trucks) was being assailed for inefficiency.
5. GM got rid of the existing EV1s because EV1s went from being expensive good PR to being expensive bad PR, full stop. How do you expect the state of California was going to profit from GM's EV1s? Do you seriously think GM's board/shareholders based their decisions on petty revenge instead of quarterly returns?
CARB and environmentalists were played by GM and other politically savvy car companies from beginning to end on the ZEV mandate. We could have had a lot more hybrids and fuel efficient cars and trucks on the road during the 'aughts; instead we got a documentary about the EV1.
A surprising number of senior scientists are not aware of the problems introduced by ending an experiment based on achieving a certain significance level.
I think the vast majority are aware of at least some of the problems. The issue is the ones who are willing to publish their results without addressing those problems honestly in the writeup.
And that's one reason why complaints about Pharmas wasting time on "me too" drugs should be taken with a grain of salt. A first in class drug usually leaves a lot of unmet medical need.
More fun: a 75-83% chance the drug caused a 15 to 45% change in a proxy, i.e., a biomarker, which is itself imperfectly correlated with your disease. Data on whether the drug actually improves lifespan/quality of life for your cohort of chronic disease patients should be back in another decade or so...
No wonder people hate evidence based medicine and would rather have someone just Reiki it away.
In a lot of fields I'd think requiring inclusion of the a priori power analysis in publications would be a decent compromise between unobtainable sample sizes and overly optimistic results. That still leaves the problem of experiments that are extended to increase the sample size after the first batch of results proved inconclusive...
do want to necessitate giving some experimental medicine to 10,000 people before assessing whether it's a good idea or not?
If the drug is going to be prescribed to millions of people a year: yes, probably. If not during a phase III trial than during a phase IV trial that begins as soon as the drug goes on the market. The reason being that while efficacy can be extrapolated from smaller trials safety is all about the outliers. A few excess deaths in a trial of several thousand could easily mean that the drug causes more harm than good overall, or that an identifiable patient subgroup can't tolerate the drug.
Blue cross had a plan that they liked. Blue cross could have left the plan the way that it was (same deductibles and coverage) and kept offering it: it was grandfathered in. Instead Blue Cross chose to:
1. Increase deductibles or decrease coverage, thus losing the exemption.
2. Terminate the plan because it made fiscal sense for them to do so.
Ya know, most illness and injuries are not due to lifestyle. Would you prefer your insurance pool to deny coverage for asthma, type I diabetes, arthritis, cancer, pneumonia, or getting mugged? How about a condition that is perhaps ~25% +/- 20% (welcome to evidence based medicine) due to lifestyle choices? Can those be everyone's problem, or as jerpyro said do you just want a fee for service plan?
I didn't downvote, but the summary says that it works in 34 states. FTA: "They left out the 16 states with existing marketplace sites, though it seems support for those states is coming soon." Oddly it does work in California, which does have a marketplace site.
If students are there for a lecture,
why not just block wifi and cell phone reception entirely (RF shielding paint) and then turn on WIFI access points only if they are needed for a quiz or exam?
Why not just have user reviews for journals? Even better would be to have reviews and ratings for individual articles.
In a way that has already been done: impact factor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
The number of times a journal article is cited by other articles/authors is a rough guide to how influential it is in the field, the same goes for the journals themselves. It's not foolproof, but not bad.
Different standards for different situations. Criminal cases require proof beyond reasonable doubt. Fingerprint matches based on 10 points in common aren't pseudoscience and are correct quite often, but will have higher rates of false positives than courts find acceptable. Polygraphs have never risen to the "beyond reasonable doubt" level, but are still better than flipping a coin.
Whether or not instructors can change true positives to false negatives doesn't affect the charges:
But instructors may be prosecuted if they know that the people they’re teaching plan to lie about crimes during federal polygraphs, he said.
In that scenario, prosecutors may pursue charges of false statements, wire fraud, obstructing an agency proceeding and “misprision of felony,” which is defined as having knowledge of serious criminal conduct and attempting to conceal it.
They could both prosecute and claim the instruction is worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
The FDA is currently groping with how to approve fecal implants to treat intestinal infections; they should be able to figure out phage as well.
I can think of one good reason to bring it to the public though: if all of your patients are screaming and ready to sue you over every hygiene violation you might just wash your hands every time you are supposed to and sterilize the @#$# out of your hospital.
Actually the big benefit of not having used antibiotics (recently) is that your intestines are still full of the normal collection of helpful bacteria, as opposed to having them wiped out and providing no competition for pathogenic bacteria like C. diff., which is currently the most common cause of antibiotic resistant death.
Most of the deaths (14,000 out of 23,000 deaths caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the US) aren't due to skin infections, they are due to C. difficile intestinal infections acquired in hospitals. Starts out as colitis and then you shit yourself to death, infecting lots of other people in the hospital along the way.
The MagSafe patent will expire in 2025: your teenager will be free to yank on cables all they want.
Ah, that LA. Makes sense now. I should have looked at your username.
By the time I was 15 I started to meet people who absolutely hate Monty Python. My unofficial poll found that most of the haters had their first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth ... and fifty first exposures to MP via acquaintances who repeated fragments of the jokes and sketches to them. That's as far as I got though: never found out why they hate Monty Python.
I'm ecstatic just to avoid crawling in stop and go traffic when driving in LA, let alone cruising at 70mph. Do you do most of your driving between 3-5AM on sundays?
I think you could pile Sarbanes-Oxley on top of that. CEOs/CFOs have to certify that their companies' public financial statements and disclosures are true so that they don't mislead their investors. Forcing them to lie on an issue that could have a big financial impact on the company (say they are a cloud storage company) should get the lobbyists into gear ...
to kill Sarbanes Oxley.
Would it be possible to create a "canary" so that falsifying it breaks SEC laws, fiduciary relationships, and other laws? Cooperating with NSA surveillance (and having the cooperation revealed) can clearly affect a company's bottom line; deliberately misleading shareholders on that point would normally be actionable. I'd guess it would go to courts that would eventually find the Patriot Act trumps everything else, but that would take some time and meanwhile the legal wrangling might get leaked ...
It's a way to turn coal (burned to manufacture ethanol from corn in the US) and diesel (ag and transportation trucks) BTUs into ethanol BTUs, and urban dollars into farm dollars.
Sta-bil has been around a long time. Keeping the alcohol from separating out helps some of the corrosion issues, though clearing out all of the fuel is better. Your lawnmower will definitely thank you for either emptying it or putting in sta-bil for the winter.
California set up a law to reward companies who spent substantial R&D money qualifying for the law, then changed the law at the last minute to take away the reward. But they still wanted the benefit of the R&D those companies did. GM wasn't having any of that, and if they weren't going to profit from developing the EV1, then neither was California.
Hogwash.
1. GM and the other car companies played the Zero Emissions environmentalists against the people who wanted fleet averages. The ZEV mandate allowed them to continue to sell their most profitable vehicles without worrying about mileage.
2. The resulting mandate for a percentage of the market to be ZEVs was easily recognizable as unenforceable as written: CA politicians weren't going run for re-election while the cars, SUVs, and pickups their constituents wanted to buy were being banned. A mandate based on incremental fines and fleet averages would have been much harder to kill if it had been enacted. That's the reason car companies chose to let the ZEV mandate pass: not because they planned on meeting it, but because it would be easier to kill later on
3. The cave in on the ZEV mandate was completely predictable, especially to GM which lobbied to kill it. Why would GM have sought to delay and finally kill the mandate if it would have given them a competitive advantage? GM could never have met the mandate, wasn't planning to, and neither could any of the other manufacturers.
4. GM's billion dollar investment in R&D was well subsidized by the ~50% R&D tax credit and research grants. It was also great PR at a time when their profit center (trucks) was being assailed for inefficiency.
5. GM got rid of the existing EV1s because EV1s went from being expensive good PR to being expensive bad PR, full stop. How do you expect the state of California was going to profit from GM's EV1s? Do you seriously think GM's board/shareholders based their decisions on petty revenge instead of quarterly returns?
CARB and environmentalists were played by GM and other politically savvy car companies from beginning to end on the ZEV mandate. We could have had a lot more hybrids and fuel efficient cars and trucks on the road during the 'aughts; instead we got a documentary about the EV1.
A surprising number of senior scientists are not aware of the problems introduced by ending an experiment based on achieving a certain significance level.
I think the vast majority are aware of at least some of the problems. The issue is the ones who are willing to publish their results without addressing those problems honestly in the writeup.
And that's one reason why complaints about Pharmas wasting time on "me too" drugs should be taken with a grain of salt. A first in class drug usually leaves a lot of unmet medical need.
More fun: a 75-83% chance the drug caused a 15 to 45% change in a proxy, i.e., a biomarker, which is itself imperfectly correlated with your disease. Data on whether the drug actually improves lifespan/quality of life for your cohort of chronic disease patients should be back in another decade or so ...
No wonder people hate evidence based medicine and would rather have someone just Reiki it away.
In a lot of fields I'd think requiring inclusion of the a priori power analysis in publications would be a decent compromise between unobtainable sample sizes and overly optimistic results. That still leaves the problem of experiments that are extended to increase the sample size after the first batch of results proved inconclusive ...
do want to necessitate giving some experimental medicine to 10,000 people before assessing whether it's a good idea or not?
If the drug is going to be prescribed to millions of people a year: yes, probably. If not during a phase III trial than during a phase IV trial that begins as soon as the drug goes on the market. The reason being that while efficacy can be extrapolated from smaller trials safety is all about the outliers. A few excess deaths in a trial of several thousand could easily mean that the drug causes more harm than good overall, or that an identifiable patient subgroup can't tolerate the drug.
Blue cross had a plan that they liked. Blue cross could have left the plan the way that it was (same deductibles and coverage) and kept offering it: it was grandfathered in. Instead Blue Cross chose to:
1. Increase deductibles or decrease coverage, thus losing the exemption.
2. Terminate the plan because it made fiscal sense for them to do so.
Ya know, most illness and injuries are not due to lifestyle. Would you prefer your insurance pool to deny coverage for asthma, type I diabetes, arthritis, cancer, pneumonia, or getting mugged? How about a condition that is perhaps ~25% +/- 20% (welcome to evidence based medicine) due to lifestyle choices? Can those be everyone's problem, or as jerpyro said do you just want a fee for service plan?
I didn't downvote, but the summary says that it works in 34 states. FTA: "They left out the 16 states with existing marketplace sites, though it seems support for those states is coming soon." Oddly it does work in California, which does have a marketplace site.
If students are there for a lecture, why not just block wifi and cell phone reception entirely (RF shielding paint) and then turn on WIFI access points only if they are needed for a quiz or exam?
Why not just have user reviews for journals? Even better would be to have reviews and ratings for individual articles.
In a way that has already been done: impact factor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
The number of times a journal article is cited by other articles/authors is a rough guide to how influential it is in the field, the same goes for the journals themselves. It's not foolproof, but not bad.
Different standards for different situations. Criminal cases require proof beyond reasonable doubt. Fingerprint matches based on 10 points in common aren't pseudoscience and are correct quite often, but will have higher rates of false positives than courts find acceptable. Polygraphs have never risen to the "beyond reasonable doubt" level, but are still better than flipping a coin.
Well put.
But instructors may be prosecuted if they know that the people they’re teaching plan to lie about crimes during federal polygraphs, he said.
In that scenario, prosecutors may pursue charges of false statements, wire fraud, obstructing an agency proceeding and “misprision of felony,” which is defined as having knowledge of serious criminal conduct and attempting to conceal it.
They could both prosecute and claim the instruction is worthless.