The problem is that photos, generally, look less attractive than people do in real life, in part because the photo becomes such a focal point in contrast to real life where there is a whole person.
Plus a lot of it depends on how pleasant the person is. A physically attractive person who's a total arse quite quickly appears less attractive. It works the other way around, too.
I played Oblivion for a while, but I was disappointed by the voice acting: that really broke the spell for me. I took some time off and then never went back because I couldn't remember what I'd been doing and didn't feel like starting over again. The whole experience just felt like too much commitment; I'd rather just play a Zelda game.
I think you're right. Specifically, I think it's because your papers usually require very large numbers of coauthors so the work is inherently cross-checked. I'm in the life-sciences. There are papers in my field which are basically single author (student/postdoc + PI), so it's much easier to pull the wool over people's eyes that way. Even in multi-author papers, often different people do different experiments so it's still possible to have a bad apple in there. In our field grants are often still given to large labs (although not on the scale of yours), so I don't think that on its own explains things.
Either she is very crazy or she did see the misconduct and just cannot admit that she can never prove it.
The other option is to simply repeat the questionable experiment. If the same result is obtained, then at least the literature is correct even if the original study was tainted. If a different result is obtained then follow it up and demonstrate conclusively that the original study was wrong. At least now the incorrect result will be shown for what it is. Duplicating the science seems like a better way of spending your time than pursuing a legal challenge whose outcome depends on hearsay.
So she said "This data is faked!" the university looked in to it, they have committees for that kind of thing as I'm sure you know,
Yes, I realise what happened in the case of TFA. I'm just mentioning my experience. In those cases no committees were involved because the issue was uncovered before publication. That usually makes it the job the PI to decide what to do with the miscreant.
I work in research and I've seen or heard of plenty of misconduct. They don't always get fired. Off the top of my head:
1. Research assistant at a friend's lab was fabricating data in order to shirk off. They discovered it because the variance of the fabricated data was weird. He admitted it when challenged and was fired.
2. PhD student I know fabricated data in order to do less work. He did a bad job of it, though, and was easily caught. He admitted it but further action wasn't taken because the lab wanted to avoid a scandal and the results weren't published. Eventually he produced a shitty thesis and was told to re-submit. He failed to do this but is writing on his CV that he has the degree.
3. Post-doc currently on my floor claimed to have produced a set of data but we all know it's a lie because: a. he didn't us the equipment at any point. b. he doesn't know how to use the equipment. c. he can't show the raw data. Was challenged by his boss and denied it. That was last year, he's still here, he's done no work, he's an arrogant prick, everyone hates him and nobody talks to him any more.
4. Post-doc in a friend's lab manipulated raw data out of all recognition. He was caught because the raw data looked nothing like his claims. He was challenged and fired.
I thought the lag happened only when 720 is up-scaled to 1080. If a 1080 TV is getting 1080 input then lag the lag goes away (or becomes negligible). Isn't that so?
The reason they would not burn a book but were ok with deleting an Ebook? Not for the preservation of knowledge, not for passing on history, not for any other archeological reason. Just because they had a sentimental connection via their senses, the touch, the smell.
Aren't you hypothesizing there? I think the aversion to burning a book is more likely to be tied to the fact that, historically, book burning is one of the first symptoms of oppression. It's often followed by imprisonment or slaughter of the people associated with the doomed books. So book burning is an act that carries emotional baggage. The same can't be said of file deletion.
which does lead to a certain amount of eyestrain and can cause circadian imbalance.
Any night-time illumination can potentially cause circadian imbalances. There's nothing special about back-lit LCD displays. Shift-work and outdoor light pollution have also been implicated in circadian disorders. Plenty of citations if you Google.
I don't think what I'm asking for is unreasonable. I'm not calling for a ban on genetic testing.
I think they should have disclaimers that enumerate the false positive rates of the tests (i.e. probability of a positive given that you don't have the mutation) and explain to a scientifically illiterate person what those numbers mean. I haven't seen that on the site as yet, but I haven't looked extensively. If it's there, it should be clearer.
Regarding the second issue, what a positive result means, I think they should be providing more information, more references (not just one), and explaining the caveats in the literature. They can't do anything about those caveats, but they need to be more clear about what a positive result means. They providing lay people with complicated and potentially scary information. They need to be more responsible about that.
To reiterate the example I listed above, if they state that one's chance of getting cancer X is 1.3 times greater than the rest of the population then they need to explain what that number means. i.e. what is is the absolute chance? The relative chance isn't what matters. They list how many people in the US have the disease, but that's not enough. They need to run the numbers for their customers in an easy to digest manner. Use graphs.
They also need to put these risks into context. For instance, people may not be so worried about having mutation X if they know that their absolute risk of getting the disease it's linked to is lower than their chance of being killed by falling down the stairs.
It's true it's silly, but you'll be sedated during the process (or should be, anyone know for sure?) so you won't notice. As far you're concerned it would be equivalent to an overdose of anaesthetic.
Seriously, if that's your outlook on life/marriage I feel really sorry for your wife.
Then you totally don't get it. It sounds like the poster you're responding to has an unconditionally loving and trusting relationship with his wife. They are both very lucky.
Yes, they should be working at higher standards. You only have to look at their "research" pages: https://www.23andme.com/about/factoids/ and click any of the links. Some are worse than others but all are shit. Click the Parkinson's & cholesterol, for instance. Vague statements and an irrelevant graph. That's the trend throughout those links. It's basically no better than astrology. The markers they test for (which is what the FDA is worried about) is a separate issue, and are more likely to be meaningful, but the fact that their "research" page is the way it is puts me off having their test. They need to explain their false positive and negative rates and say what it is for each test (e.g. penicillin sensitivity). They also need to be clearer on what a positive for particular marker means. e.g. WTF does "Slightly higher odds of developing basal cell carcinoma" actually mean? If you re-read the page more carefully you notice that it's 1.3 times greater odds. But 1.3 times greater than what? One of the basic rules of data analysis is that if you don't know what a proportional change means in absolute terms then you know nothing. i.e. it's bollocks. Yes, I could click on the original publication, but most people don't have the scientific background to understand it. Furthermore, if there are few studies linking gene X with condition Y then you're not even sure how true or how widely applicable the results are. e.g. if the studies were done on white people from Europe then are the results true for a black person from Africa? We don't know and 23andMe don't tell use this is a caveat (which it is).
I think it depends where you post-doc. I'm at a private research institute in the US and I get paid about $55k gross plus an excellent health plan. It's hardly starvation wages. I went looking for jobs in industry and a good chunk of them weren't going to pay me any more. Didn't take those, of course.
Indeed. In fact, the whole acquired immune system works via natural selection. However the ID crowd don't deny natural selection (they can't get away with that any more), instead they deny that natural selection could have led to the species diversity we see today.
YOu have never seen anything evolve and you never will. You just believe what you are told by someone who never saw it and never will.
Well, my dear troll, these e. coli experiments show you're wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli_long-term_evolution_experiment One defining characteristics of e. coli is that they don't digest citric acid. In these experiments, the bacteria were grown with a limited food supply and a subset of them evolved through natural selection to digest citric acid. i.e. they have acquired a characteristic normally alien to c. elegans. So there you go: evolution in action.
Additionally, saying "you'll never see it in action so it's all faith" is a shit argument because we have a lot of indirect evidence of evolution. e.g. the phylogenetic tree, fossil record, and experimental observation of natural selection in action. This form of indirect evidence is common in sciences where what you're observing happens too quickly, too slowly, or is too small. Microbiology begun in this way, particle physics is arguably like this now, a lot of astrophysics is like this.
I don't see how this explains altruism, this explains self interest. It's no different than chimps taking turns picking lice off each other. (Disclaimer: I had chimp-like ancestors. Also, I am not saying chimps and the people in TFA are equivalent). Altruism is jumping on a live hand grenade, or taking on a predator while the rest of the troop flees.
That's a pretty extreme definition of altruism. Besides, in second example your offspring might be doing the fleeing so one could argue that this is again a case of self-interest. At the end of the day, distinguishing enlightened self-interest from altruism is probably one for the philosophers.
They also have double-standards when they say "teach creationism" because they want THEIR version of creationism taught and not an American Indian, Norse, Greek, Islamic, Wiccan, or any other creation myth.
Is a pair of double-standards called quadruple standards?
This is a good point. Debating with these people or fighting with them with regard to creationism in schools has the bad side effect of legitimising their point of view. It implies there's something in it because we're taking time out to fight it. A much better idea might be for us to push for what you're getting at and make biology teachers discuss all those creation myths you list: reductio ad absurdum.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
But "democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
But democracy isn't one thing. There are a lot of ways in which democracies can differ from each other. e.g. the Athenian democracy was very different from our own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy Only free adult males could take part and the political party system didn't exist. In a modern democracy, there are lots of ways you could run the show differently to have different outcomes. Let's take the US. Imagine how different things would be if:
A. This endless fund raising was banned and your elected officials just got on with government. A fixed sum might be given by the state to all political parties raising over X votes. The law might not apply to nascent parties who were getting started and not yet in a position of power.
B. Lobbyists were banned from making any sort of donation to elected officials or their representatives.
C. Elected officials were not allowed external activities which constitute a conflict of interest with their duties in government (e.g. Cheney & Haliburton).
D. Regulators should be genuinely independent and without a conflict of interest. e.g. don't appoint Wall St. guys to regulate Wall St.
E. You could even reform the voting system. There are interesting alternatives out there.
In other words, make it once more a government of the people and for the people and don't things that conflict with that. If those things were fixed 30 years ago, we'd be in a much better place today.
Other countries have other problems too. I'm just bringing up the US because I'm living here right now and, as a foreigner, I more sharply see the contrasts with other countries I've lived in.
The second is that monarchies traditionally don't provide a good way of deselecting the ruler. Perhaps the biggest selling point of democracy is that you get to have a revolution and overthrow the government every few years, without anyone having to die.
And this is working really well right now in the US, isn't it (not that the UK is doing all that much better)? The two main parties are basically identical and keep themselves in power by arguing about petty points that keep the electorate rooting for their side in the manner of football supporters. Simultaneously, the difference between the two sides is exaggerated by name-calling: e.g. the far right party calling the leader of right party a communist.
So it doesn't matter who you vote for, because they're all the same. Unless you have money you have no real pull, as a result the country is being run for the mega-corps not the people. It's time for a revolution, but the people are too busy on twitter to do anything about it.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that photos, generally, look less attractive than people do in real life, in part because the photo becomes such a focal point in contrast to real life where there is a whole person.
Plus a lot of it depends on how pleasant the person is. A physically attractive person who's a total arse quite quickly appears less attractive. It works the other way around, too.
In fact, it's Britney Spears who is used in this capacity: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/29/britney-spears-navy-scare-somali-pirates
I played Oblivion for a while, but I was disappointed by the voice acting: that really broke the spell for me. I took some time off and then never went back because I couldn't remember what I'd been doing and didn't feel like starting over again. The whole experience just felt like too much commitment; I'd rather just play a Zelda game.
free speech works the same way, you will be held accountable for it
It's amazing how often people forget that.
I think you're right. Specifically, I think it's because your papers usually require very large numbers of coauthors so the work is inherently cross-checked. I'm in the life-sciences. There are papers in my field which are basically single author (student/postdoc + PI), so it's much easier to pull the wool over people's eyes that way. Even in multi-author papers, often different people do different experiments so it's still possible to have a bad apple in there. In our field grants are often still given to large labs (although not on the scale of yours), so I don't think that on its own explains things.
There simply does not seem to be enough proof.
Either she is very crazy or she did see the misconduct and just cannot admit that she can never prove it.
The other option is to simply repeat the questionable experiment. If the same result is obtained, then at least the literature is correct even if the original study was tainted. If a different result is obtained then follow it up and demonstrate conclusively that the original study was wrong. At least now the incorrect result will be shown for what it is. Duplicating the science seems like a better way of spending your time than pursuing a legal challenge whose outcome depends on hearsay.
So she said "This data is faked!" the university looked in to it, they have committees for that kind of thing as I'm sure you know,
Yes, I realise what happened in the case of TFA. I'm just mentioning my experience. In those cases no committees were involved because the issue was uncovered before publication. That usually makes it the job the PI to decide what to do with the miscreant.
1. Research assistant at a friend's lab was fabricating data in order to shirk off. They discovered it because the variance of the fabricated data was weird. He admitted it when challenged and was fired.
2. PhD student I know fabricated data in order to do less work. He did a bad job of it, though, and was easily caught. He admitted it but further action wasn't taken because the lab wanted to avoid a scandal and the results weren't published. Eventually he produced a shitty thesis and was told to re-submit. He failed to do this but is writing on his CV that he has the degree.
3. Post-doc currently on my floor claimed to have produced a set of data but we all know it's a lie because: a. he didn't us the equipment at any point. b. he doesn't know how to use the equipment. c. he can't show the raw data. Was challenged by his boss and denied it. That was last year, he's still here, he's done no work, he's an arrogant prick, everyone hates him and nobody talks to him any more.
4. Post-doc in a friend's lab manipulated raw data out of all recognition. He was caught because the raw data looked nothing like his claims. He was challenged and fired.
I'm sure this sort of thing happens all the time.
I thought the lag happened only when 720 is up-scaled to 1080. If a 1080 TV is getting 1080 input then lag the lag goes away (or becomes negligible). Isn't that so?
The reason they would not burn a book but were ok with deleting an Ebook? Not for the preservation of knowledge, not for passing on history, not for any other archeological reason. Just because they had a sentimental connection via their senses, the touch, the smell.
Aren't you hypothesizing there? I think the aversion to burning a book is more likely to be tied to the fact that, historically, book burning is one of the first symptoms of oppression. It's often followed by imprisonment or slaughter of the people associated with the doomed books. So book burning is an act that carries emotional baggage. The same can't be said of file deletion.
which does lead to a certain amount of eyestrain and can cause circadian imbalance.
Any night-time illumination can potentially cause circadian imbalances. There's nothing special about back-lit LCD displays. Shift-work and outdoor light pollution have also been implicated in circadian disorders. Plenty of citations if you Google.
I think they should have disclaimers that enumerate the false positive rates of the tests (i.e. probability of a positive given that you don't have the mutation) and explain to a scientifically illiterate person what those numbers mean. I haven't seen that on the site as yet, but I haven't looked extensively. If it's there, it should be clearer.
Regarding the second issue, what a positive result means, I think they should be providing more information, more references (not just one), and explaining the caveats in the literature. They can't do anything about those caveats, but they need to be more clear about what a positive result means. They providing lay people with complicated and potentially scary information. They need to be more responsible about that.
To reiterate the example I listed above, if they state that one's chance of getting cancer X is 1.3 times greater than the rest of the population then they need to explain what that number means. i.e. what is is the absolute chance? The relative chance isn't what matters. They list how many people in the US have the disease, but that's not enough. They need to run the numbers for their customers in an easy to digest manner. Use graphs.
They also need to put these risks into context. For instance, people may not be so worried about having mutation X if they know that their absolute risk of getting the disease it's linked to is lower than their chance of being killed by falling down the stairs.
It's true it's silly, but you'll be sedated during the process (or should be, anyone know for sure?) so you won't notice. As far you're concerned it would be equivalent to an overdose of anaesthetic.
Seriously, if that's your outlook on life/marriage I feel really sorry for your wife.
Then you totally don't get it. It sounds like the poster you're responding to has an unconditionally loving and trusting relationship with his wife. They are both very lucky.
Yes, they should be working at higher standards. You only have to look at their "research" pages: https://www.23andme.com/about/factoids/ and click any of the links. Some are worse than others but all are shit. Click the Parkinson's & cholesterol, for instance. Vague statements and an irrelevant graph. That's the trend throughout those links. It's basically no better than astrology. The markers they test for (which is what the FDA is worried about) is a separate issue, and are more likely to be meaningful, but the fact that their "research" page is the way it is puts me off having their test. They need to explain their false positive and negative rates and say what it is for each test (e.g. penicillin sensitivity). They also need to be clearer on what a positive for particular marker means. e.g. WTF does "Slightly higher odds of developing basal cell carcinoma" actually mean? If you re-read the page more carefully you notice that it's 1.3 times greater odds. But 1.3 times greater than what? One of the basic rules of data analysis is that if you don't know what a proportional change means in absolute terms then you know nothing. i.e. it's bollocks. Yes, I could click on the original publication, but most people don't have the scientific background to understand it. Furthermore, if there are few studies linking gene X with condition Y then you're not even sure how true or how widely applicable the results are. e.g. if the studies were done on white people from Europe then are the results true for a black person from Africa? We don't know and 23andMe don't tell use this is a caveat (which it is).
I think it depends where you post-doc. I'm at a private research institute in the US and I get paid about $55k gross plus an excellent health plan. It's hardly starvation wages. I went looking for jobs in industry and a good chunk of them weren't going to pay me any more. Didn't take those, of course.
Indeed. In fact, the whole acquired immune system works via natural selection. However the ID crowd don't deny natural selection (they can't get away with that any more), instead they deny that natural selection could have led to the species diversity we see today.
oops. Meant e. coli but wrote c. elegans. :/
YOu have never seen anything evolve and you never will. You just believe what you are told by someone who never saw it and never will.
Well, my dear troll, these e. coli experiments show you're wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli_long-term_evolution_experiment One defining characteristics of e. coli is that they don't digest citric acid. In these experiments, the bacteria were grown with a limited food supply and a subset of them evolved through natural selection to digest citric acid. i.e. they have acquired a characteristic normally alien to c. elegans. So there you go: evolution in action.
Additionally, saying "you'll never see it in action so it's all faith" is a shit argument because we have a lot of indirect evidence of evolution. e.g. the phylogenetic tree, fossil record, and experimental observation of natural selection in action. This form of indirect evidence is common in sciences where what you're observing happens too quickly, too slowly, or is too small. Microbiology begun in this way, particle physics is arguably like this now, a lot of astrophysics is like this.
I don't see how this explains altruism, this explains self interest. It's no different than chimps taking turns picking lice off each other. (Disclaimer: I had chimp-like ancestors. Also, I am not saying chimps and the people in TFA are equivalent). Altruism is jumping on a live hand grenade, or taking on a predator while the rest of the troop flees.
That's a pretty extreme definition of altruism. Besides, in second example your offspring might be doing the fleeing so one could argue that this is again a case of self-interest. At the end of the day, distinguishing enlightened self-interest from altruism is probably one for the philosophers.
They also have double-standards when they say "teach creationism" because they want THEIR version of creationism taught and not an American Indian, Norse, Greek, Islamic, Wiccan, or any other creation myth.
Is a pair of double-standards called quadruple standards?
This is a good point. Debating with these people or fighting with them with regard to creationism in schools has the bad side effect of legitimising their point of view. It implies there's something in it because we're taking time out to fight it. A much better idea might be for us to push for what you're getting at and make biology teachers discuss all those creation myths you list: reductio ad absurdum.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
But "democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
But democracy isn't one thing. There are a lot of ways in which democracies can differ from each other. e.g. the Athenian democracy was very different from our own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy Only free adult males could take part and the political party system didn't exist. In a modern democracy, there are lots of ways you could run the show differently to have different outcomes. Let's take the US. Imagine how different things would be if:
In other words, make it once more a government of the people and for the people and don't things that conflict with that. If those things were fixed 30 years ago, we'd be in a much better place today.
Other countries have other problems too. I'm just bringing up the US because I'm living here right now and, as a foreigner, I more sharply see the contrasts with other countries I've lived in.
The second is that monarchies traditionally don't provide a good way of deselecting the ruler. Perhaps the biggest selling point of democracy is that you get to have a revolution and overthrow the government every few years, without anyone having to die.
And this is working really well right now in the US, isn't it (not that the UK is doing all that much better)? The two main parties are basically identical and keep themselves in power by arguing about petty points that keep the electorate rooting for their side in the manner of football supporters. Simultaneously, the difference between the two sides is exaggerated by name-calling: e.g. the far right party calling the leader of right party a communist.
So it doesn't matter who you vote for, because they're all the same. Unless you have money you have no real pull, as a result the country is being run for the mega-corps not the people. It's time for a revolution, but the people are too busy on twitter to do anything about it.
I don't post to internet fora. Not even under a pseudonym. If they know me well enough, they can figure out who I am from my alias. Oh. oops.
Isn't MRI practically NMR? NMR is used for chemical analysis. Then how come MRI machines can't be programmed to do the same?
I think they have/are been: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9339439 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23494381 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12891651 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/brain-imaging-0301.html