Neither plan addresses victims of malpractice. The McCain plan mentions Malpractice Reform, but this is mainly about protecting doctors against abusive lawsuits. The interplay between medical and psychiatric illness is difficult and complex, and probably way beyond the scope of this thread, but in a general sense, the Obama plan's emphasis on disease prevention, health maintenance, and electronic medical records would be expected overall to decrease complication rates for people with chronic conditions such as schizophrenia. For specific suggestions on recourses, I better leave that to any lawyers reading along here. Good luck.
The New England Journal of Medicine (the pre-eminent general medical journal in the US) has a recent, thoughtful, neutral analysis of the competing plans: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/8/781 As a physician who as practiced in Infectious Disease, Internal Medicine, and Emergency Medicine, I have experienced first hand how dysfunctional is the US system of healthcare financing. Although I am not thrilled with either candidate's plan, I am convinced Obama's plan would do much more to ensure that Americans have access to affordable healthcare. This is especially true for those people (and I am guessing no small number of young-adult Slashdotters are in this category) who are currently uninsured, just gambling that they can stay healthy. Get out there and vote, folks, this is a big one.
Key Science Geeks that should be more widely known
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Top Ten Geek Girls
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· Score: 1
These two were towering figures in science, probably behind only Curie in importance, and vastly underappreciated for a very long time -in no small measure do to their gender. McClintock finally did get the Nobel after decades of obscurity and Meitner was eventually honored with the naming of the element, Meitnerium. These are amazing stories that -speaking as a scientist and geek myself- I think any self-respecting science geek really should know.
Just to expand and clarify a bit: 1) The exact prevalence of toxoplasma infection in the world is hard to measure, but in the US, there are good measurements of the prevalence of _antibodies_ against the parasite, and these are around 50%. People with these antibodies are presumed to have been exposed and to harbor chronic latent infection. Most will never have any (known) symptoms. 2) The above is important because this latent infection can reactivate if the immune system becomes suppressed. For example, toxo encephalitis is second only to Pneumocystis pneumonia (in the US. -Second to Tuberculosis in the world at large) among severe opportunistic infections seen in AIDS. 3) It is also important since people _without_ antibodies are at risk of getting an acute infection, which can be dangerous to the fetus in a pregnant woman. This is why we measure toxo antibodies and advise pregnant, seronegative women not to change the catbox. 4) Toxo is also worth knowing about since it can occasionally cause symptomatic infection even in people with normal immune symptoms, most notably a syndrome that looks like mono (but tests negative on the "monospot"). 5) This sort of life-long latent infection is quite common. Most of the world is infected with a variety of Herpes viruses, for example. In the particular case of the Herpes Simplex Viruses (HSV1 and HSV2), since they infect neurons, there has long been speculation that at least in some animals they might change the behavior of their hosts in ways that favor transmission. 6) There are also numerous known cases where parasites alter the behavior of their hosts in ways that help them spread. A few are cited in TFA. There are no proven human examples where the central nervous system is involved directly, but some common symptoms of infection involving peripheral nerve-mediated responses (e.g. sneezing) clearly have this effect. 7) host-parasite interactions have played an important role in many aspects of evolution (most obviously, the immune system) and the brain is certainly no exception. There are probably many subtle effects not yet understood, but these, involving complex behaviors, are difficult to really pin down experimentally. Therefore, it is important to be clear about what is real data (e.g. the mouse maze experiment cited in TFA) and what is speculation (e.g. that toxo may influence human emotions in a manner analogous to what was seen in mice; or that venereally spread HSV2 might influence primate sexual behavior).
Although the cited article states that the devices are implanted in the biceps, the original press release says that it is in the triceps. Also, the company web site describes the implantation as "just under the skin" (subcutaneously, i.e."sub-Q") rather than in the muscle (intramuscularly, i.e. "IM"). Triceps would make more sense if you need to get close to a wall-mounted reader. Sub-Q location would also be less painful and less dangerous, e.g. in case of infection. Just to show one can be just as geeky about wetware issues. For/.-ers not up on their anatomy, see the wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triceps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biceps_brachii
These independent image analysis efforts are laudable and interesting but seem to lack the psychological aspects. I think what many lay-people want most from these images is a sense of what it would look like to them if they were there themselves standing on the titanscape. This is much more complex than just stiching the images together and has a lot to do with how the brain processes visual information. For example, although the colors in the images are all pretty orange, the way the brain perceives color relies in part on subtracting out the background and seeing the _relative_ color of objects in the field of view. Also, the total level of illumination has not been defined (there was some speculation that daylight on titan would be like full moonlight on Earth), and this will influence both the spatial resolution and color perception that a human (even with dark-adapted eyes) would see. Has anyone tried to take these psychological/neurological factors into account when generating these processed images?
I was hoping someone who knows more about this than I would step in, but on the off chance that anyone is still reading this sub-thread, I think there is a deep real world principle at stake. In noisy, evolutionary simulations of the IPD, what happened in the ref I cited was that for some conditions TFT would arise and spread until all-cooperate variants could begin to proliferate under the protection of the cloud of TFT's. Once the all-C (what I called, a bit too harshly, "suckers") population reached a high enough level, all-defect (predators) swept through and caused the whole "ecosystem" to collapse into a low-payoff all-defect state. Under some conditions of noise, mutation rate, and payoff matrix, though, the "pavlov" strategy (where you make the same move if it worked well for you the last time with that partner, and make the opposite move if it did not) would arise and become stable at high overall payoff over very long simulations, much less susceptible to crashing into all-defect. "Pavlov" is perfectly willing to punish defectors, reward rational cooperates, but take advantage of naive cooperators, which made it much more stable in the long run. I think the difference between this and the recent contest is that the contest had a fixed set of entrants that could not be invaded by new all-C or all-D mutants. Without trying to oversimplify a deep subject, I would suggest an expansion of the classical population biology notions of ecological niches to include producers, predators, parasites, and policers. There is also a whole rich literature in widening the basic PD schema to include things like partial cooperation and "reputaton" building. Maybe the IPD would be fun for a real slashdot network game...
As a microbiologist with interest in evolution, I have followed this field from afar for years. Looking over the results, I was surprised at how relatively poorly "Pavlov" (win-stay lose-shift) did, since it performs so strongly in noisy, evolutionany, versions of the game. [see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fc gi?hold ing=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8316296&d opt=Abstract It was also a bit dismaying to see how well "Grim" (hold a grudge forever) did in both games. In evolutionary versions of the game, Pavlov helps keep down the population of "suckers" (thereby decreasing the food supply for more predatory and parasitic strategies) while still rewarding "provokable" cooperators (thereby increasing the total aggregate "reward" of the ecosystem. Also, one essential part of the payoff structure that deserves emphasis is that the payoff for cooperating has to be more than half the average of the winner and loser's payoff for defection, else one benefits by simply alternating each turn. This is a little bit like the winners did here, where they got the top spots at the cost of a lower total take for their "team". One real world example of slashdot interest where this might make sense is if you take these losses in order to eliminate your rivals from the game and then reap monopoly benefits once you control the game (not to mention any names...). Maybe someone who has analyzed the results in more detail could comment on how the various well known strategies fared and why.
"Politzer is a pretty good and patient prof, answering questions, explaining basic physics points, etc. although one time he did get annoyed at a cocky youngster (I don't think it was you - this was 26 years ago) slouched up in the front row."
Couldn't have been me. I've always been a back row guy, and only made comments to the person sitting next to me. Also, except for a brief period needed to pass AMA95, I have never known the Stokes equation to save my life.;^)
I'd forgotten about Gomez but your posted knocked loose a bunch of old memories. One that comes to mind relevant to this sub-thread on teaching is that he threatened to give us negative points for answers that were not only wrong, but that did not make sense. He said that anyone should be able to get an answer that was at least in the right units, with the right sign, and in the right order of magnitude. I don't know if he ever made good on this threat. I have always wanted to try this with my students but have never quite had the hard-heartedness to reallly do it.
Hey! One of these guys (Politzer) was my Phys 1 prof when I was a frosh at Caltech *cough* 27 years ago, and I actually _remember_ his explanation of asymptotic freedom to us (even though I am a only a biology guy)! I also remember Feynman's guest lecture on numerical methods for "solving" otherwise impossible problems in Quantum Mechanics (which he demonstrated with a hand calculator!). We (the undergrads) were for the most part cocky know-it-alls with no clue what a privilege it was to have these folks (and many others of their caliber) teaching us up close and personal. Now, I look back with amazement at being able to discuss/joke/plead with these folks like it was no big deal. Seriously, if there are any gung-ho Slashlings out there looking for an intense science education, Caltech is hard to beat. Of course, if hazy memory serves in this matter, more than half the class flunked that first Phys1 midterm, so this is not for the faint of heart...
I don't want to reply to this poster directly. The content and tone I think speak for themselves. I also don't want to tackle the subject of Science and Religion overall, which would be both off-topic and also biting off way more than I could chew. Since I started this sub-thread, though, I should correct the implied assertion that I am not religious. I am an honest to god practicing scientist but also a church-going, choir-singing, Sunday school-teaching religious person. Religion is not at all uncommon among scientists. What is quite rare is the kind of fundamentalist religion that asserts the absolute and unchallengeable Truth of some particular religious tradition. It is fundamentalism, not Religion, that is in conflict with science. There are fundamentalist secular traditions as well, like doctrinaire Marxism, that are every bit as hostile to open scientific inquiry.
To bring this back to the original topic, another part of the distortion of science by the current administration is the deliberate use of a false dichotomy between science and religion as a calculated wedge issue to whip up the evangelical base. Again, this is not a simple partisan assertion. Neither Bush senior nor Bush junior's Republican challenger, John McCain, did this sort of thing. This is a specific criticism of the current Bush administration and its terrible distortion of science.
As it happens, I have over the past several years been giving a cycle of lay-led sermons in my church on the connections between my field (biomedical science) and spirituality. Interested parties can get them from my.Mac page at:
http://homepage.mac.com/colgrove
In the "sermons" folder. My next sermon is coming up October 3rd (on "Death"), and you are all welcome;^) . Just go to the Theodore Parker Church in West Roxbury, MA:
I had not intended to reply to replies, but this post makes an important point that I think deserves emphasis in a more politically neutral fashion.
There exists a natural human tendency to apply flexible standards of evidence to emotionally charged topics: very lax standards for what is ideologically comforting but impossibly high standards of "proof" for hypotheses that are threatening to cherished beliefs. Though natural, when unchecked this process becomes terribly poisonous to reasoned debate in a democracy and it is incumbent upon citizens to push back against it, in ourselves as well as in others.
Strictly speaking, scientific theories are never proven true. Rather, scientific theories make specific falsifiable hypotheses that can be experimentally tested (though one has to avoid simplistic notions of what this entails). Reliable theories are those that have withstood many tests and have as yet failed to be falsified. Even more strictly, one can never absolutely even prove a scientific theory false; one can only force its adherents into ever more complex, tortured and ad hoc assertions in defense of the theory, trusting that as old adherents fade away and new minds view the data afresh, the implausibility of bad theories will eventually become apparent.
These notions are deep and subtle and I think honestly misunderstood by many otherwise reasonable people. Part of why the current administration is so bad with regard to science comes from the influence of those who understand the issues quite well, yet cynically use impossible demands for absolute proof as a way to block what they don't like (e.g. regulations on greenhouse gases), and absurdly low standards of evidence to promote what they want (e.g. the efficacy of of current anti-ballistic missile technology).
Part of the process of good science comes from clear and consistent definitions, so I think it is important to point out here the danger in the current vernacular use of conservative as synonomous with right-wing (and liberal with left-wing). One of the most dangerous aspects of the present administration is that policy is being shaped by right-wing radicals who are not at all conservative in the ordinary meaning of the term.
I rarely post here given signal-to-noise-ratio (and vehemence-to-knowledge-ratio) problems, but as an actual scientist and as someone who takes the responsibilities of citizenship seriously, I feel I should contribute to this thread in the faint hope of making some small difference.
I have been paying close attention to science policy since the Nixon years. Every administration, Republican and Democrat has had serious problems with its science policy, but in my opinion, and in the opinion of many of us old enough to have been there, there has never been an adminstration where Science was so badly distorted for ideological reasons. From climate change to missile defense to abortion to environmental toxins to the teaching of evolution, the Bush administration has made science subordinate to its ideological positions.
As others in this thread have noted, the actual printed responses in the Nature article are mostly unhelpful canned PR blurbs (and it is a scary sign of ideological polarization to see Nature, the world's most prestigious general scientific journal, described as "far left"), but it is important not to lose sight of the fact that this is not just politics as usual. There are plenty of conservatives and Republicans who are friends of good science, but there is nothing conservative about the Bush administration in this regard: they are radicals, in favor of science only when it supports their ideology.
This is terribly dangerous. To paraphrase the great physicist, Richard Feynman, (whom I first heard make statements like this when I was a student at Caltech): For any technological society to succeed, sound science must take precendence over ideological conviction, because nature cannot be fooled. In my opinion, the Bush administration's failure to understand this concept presents a grave danger to our country and to the world.
Seriously, though, I run a macOS&ppclinux based HIV research lab and fight a running battle with MS-centric hospital IS who keep trying to ram Windows down everyone's throats. I run my own mail server but am required as a matter of institutional policy to maintain (and read) e-mail and announcements on their Exchange/Outlook sytem. I am moving the macs to OS X and would love an Outlook replacement that interoperates with the hospital's Exhange servers but doesn't get infected with outlook viruses (bad form for a virologist).
Thanks for the pointers. As a Mac/UNIX person, I do my best to avoid Windows (in no small measure due to virus risks) and MS software in general. As such , although I occasionally have to use Office, or Outlook on some of the machines in the hospital (my own lab is all mac&linux), I am not up on the exact menus that one uses to set security standards. Is this written down in some place I could copy?
The above provides an excellent example of my point about political ranting. In the original post, I (quite deliberately) had nothing to say about the relative ecological morality of Europeans vs. Native Americans, the role of politics in the practice of science, or the objectivity and ethical responsibilities of scientists. I merely pointed out an aspect of the biology and history that struck me as interesting. I am all for working to understand the larger social context of scientific theories, but this needs to start with a real attempt to understand the data rather than a with a reflexive leap to defend pre-existing ideological positions. In the interests of full disclosure, my own ideological position is that biology is so much deeper than politics that the attempt to see the former through the narrow filter of the latter is an all too common prescription for foolishness. In the interests of staying on topic, a larger way to make my original point would be to say that the research into possible causes of the North American megafauna reminds us again of a major theme in 20th century science: a rejection of dogmatic Uniformitarianism (not Unitarianism!;^) and a growing appreciation of the role of catastrophic events (some perhaps man-made) in shaping the modern world. Clearly this is a topic with potential political, philosophical, and even religious implications, but this is one biologist (and Unitarian!) who finds this a call for further study and reflection rather than for a tirade on slashdot.
One interesting side point on the subject of New World Mass Extinctions is its implications for how we think about Native American cultures as seen by the Europeans after Columbus. Typical European portrayals depict the Native Americans as existing in a pristine aboriginal state of Nature. What we can see now is that North America at the time of the first European colonists had actually undergone enormous environmental upheaval in the previous several thousand years. What the Europeans saw was not an original state but a hard won equilibrium. The striking harmony with nature seen in many Native American tribes was itself the product of a long process of natural selection.
As an aside, as a biologist and a grownup, I find it dispiriting to see the fraction of posts on biological topics that degenerate into sophomoric political ranting (invariably from non-biologists with a very shallow grasp of the topic). Even the simplest biological phenomenon -let alone something as complex as a whole ecology- is so much deeper and more complex that our simple political theories that it is just foolish to try to score polictical points by making the biology fit one's ideological preconceptions. Please, for the sake of the readers, keep the political ranting somewhere else and spend some time actually learning the biology.
Well, on the off chance this doesn't get buried in the slashnoise, I have been trying to interest linux folk in this for some time.
Not just duplicating MIDI tools but rather using linux to go beyond MIDI and make software "instruments" that are rich and expressive like their acoustical brethren. I play and write for piano, voice, and recorder and have been on the hunt for good music programs at reasonable cost.
As others here have pointed out, a simpleminded projection of music into digital tools can lose as much as it gains. For example, MIDI is heavily biased toward the 12-tone equal tempered scale of modern western music. This scale is fine for most loud, busy, and only approximately tuned harmonies of most pop music (and has a number of advantages for easy key-changing) but on the other hand, the scale lacks the pure, sweet thirds and sixths that you can hear in, for example, renaissance polyphony, and comes nowhere close to the harmonic sevenths common in Barbershop and other close harmony vocal traditions.
In addition, all sorts of other scales (meantone, "well-termpered", 19-, 31-, or 53- tone equal tempered, etc.) would be great to use in music if you could switch among them as easily as MIDI lets you switch among instuments (the math regarding tuning systems is very interesting -though it tends to be a crackpot magnet- and might make a good slashdot thread. I wrote some perl->gnuplot scripts to show some of the patterns and I would post them if I wasn't averse to getting slashdotted).
Same goes for musical timbre and control of pitch overtones. All these things sound like a perfect game for musically inclined Open Source hackers. I am slowly teaching myself the computer side of things but in between my other five jobs, it is likely that others could do it a lot faster. I'd be happy to help, though, from the music side. Anybody on this case already?
OK, I'm a working scientist have known about Bruno since I was a kid scouring the local libraries for science classics. It's nice of Brin to remind people of this great hero of science but Brin mixes up his history with his prejudice when he writes:
"Many of his other writings now seem silly, deliberately provocative, or just perplexingly obscure, such as his doctrine of panpsychism (belief that reality is constituted by the mind), which anticipated the teachings of Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza."
Bruno was indeed one of the great Pantheist philosophers (and this was no small part of what got him in trouble with the church) but Dr. Brin surely must know that there are plenty of us thoroughly modern science-types quite sympathetic to pantheist views of the Universe and who see nothing silly or obscure about them. Brin lets his own anti-religious biases delude him into assuming that any self-respecting modern would share his blithe dismissal of Bruno's metaphysics. Here, he makes a classic error, confusing science and philosophy and his personal tastes with universal standards of reason. No one reads Bruno or Gallileo anymore to learn the science; science has progressed beyond them. In contrast, many wise people still find much of value in the philosophical writings of the great philosophers of antiquity. If I were Brin, I'd be a little more humble, for example, about casually blowing off the beliefs of Liebniz and Spinoza, two of the sharpest minds of all time. Maybe they were just silly but I would argue that the burden of proof for this assertion would weigh heavily on Brin. Brin should just stick to the history and leave his metaphysical tastes somewhere else. Also, while we are on the subject of Martyrs to Reason, and speaking as a good church going, choir singing, sunday school teaching Unitarian pantheist, maybe Brin should have Bruno meet up with Michael Servetus, theologian, philosopher, and physician, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and burned at the stake by Calvin himself for championing the Unitarian heresy of the oneness of God. (I'd give the links but I don't want to get slashdotted).
This one really takes me back. We used to run a pirate hacked together FM station (KKAL, no relation to the legit Berkeley station) at a glorious 1 watt out of a broom closet in Page House at Caltech back in the mid 70's. We had live music (sometimes pretty good but sometimes as lame as me on the tenor recorder with a mike on a long cord to the basement tunnels). We wrote our own soap opera (Maggie's Farm), and had outrageous commentary on all sorts of things we didn't have enough sense not to say. At 7 AM during finals week we would broadcast the official theme song of finals, "The Ride of the Valkyries", and the EE majors would try to one up one another with enormous homebuilt speakers throughout the campus. On a good night, with a good antenna, you could pick up KKAL throughout much of the surrounding ritzy San Marino neighborhood. When I went back to Tech a few years ago (not -gasp- looking like somebody's parent), the old KKAL closet was gone and replaced with a bank of terminals where people were playing computer games. Sic Transit Gloria Emmcee, I guess. Any recent techers know what happened to KKAL?
Beware of Sociologists bearing analogies.
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The Regulon
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· Score: 2
Jon Katz asks for biologists to comment. I'm a biologist and my research (HIV virus drug resistance) involves Darwinian evolution about as directly as one ever sees it on human time scales. That said, in my experience, Darwinian reasoning applied to cultural phenomena are mostly dis-analogies: just similar enough to mislead and obscure rather than illuminate and explain. They are more often than not just modern myth-making masquerading as science, a haven for lazy, armchair speculators. An often repeated complaint among evolutionary biologists is that it is the field of science with the largest number of people who think they understand it but don't. In the case of information, as others have pointed out already, human attention is finite and limiting and serves to winnow what information is saved and transmitted. There is a crude evolutionary analogy here but it does not in my opinion get you any further than just good sense. There may be interesting evolutionary facets to how we as social primates deal or don't deal with abundant information but that is a different subject. In addition, the notion of attention as an important rate-limiting step in modern human culture is interesting but is hardly original and only tenuously connected to evolution. There are many lifetimes of good honest work to be had in the study of real evolution without treking into lame cultural analogies.
1) The existence of the planet was _inferred_ from spectography of the star, showing doppler shifts consistent with a wobble caused by an unseen planetary companion.
2) The size and periodicity of the wobble allowed the researchers to _predict_ the size, and period of the planet's orbit.
3) The existence of the planet was _confirmed_ by finding a photometric dimming of light from the star, consistent with transit of a gas giant planet, at exactly the time and periodicity _predicted_ by the spectography.
The chance that two _independent_ means of detection would give the _same_ predictions for the inferred planet is remote and provides very strong evidence for the reality of the planet. This is a very important result and a very nice piece of science.
Speaking as a working scientist, I think it is also a very nice demonstration of how how science works in the real world, too often misunderstood even by the techies on slashdot.
Stephenson: Cool on Software - Dumb on Wetware
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Snow Crash
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· Score: 1
Glad to see the Snow Crash review. I was thinking of writing one myself but this allows me to make the basic point more briefly.
[Stephenson and I are just about the same vintage and with similar computing experience but in Real Life (TM), I am a physician and medical researcher on the molecular biology of HIV.]
When Stephenson is on the razzle, he is a hoot to read, throwing off cute quips and wild ideas at warp speed. Sadly, like a lot of glib, witty people, he seems to fall in love with his own patter (the curse of the Raconteur )and often loses any sense of when he doesn't know what he is talking about.
His political ideas are his own opinions and his computing ideas are fine as far as I can tell as a non-expert (in distinction to William Gibson, who got the feel of the cypberpunk world dead on while remaining clueless about the technology itself). His takes on ancient history are also more than a little idiosyncratic but again this is not my territory. What is annoying to me is that he makes a big deal about some biomedical topics with a very poor understanding of the underlying science. In particular, the biological basis of the wetare crash is highly implausible and his speculations on the evolution of viruses are just dumb.
It's worse than that because the underlying ideas are quite interesting -though hardly original- and would make great story fodder for someone willing to learn the material. It's fine not to become expert in subjects that are peripheral to one's work and it's fine to throw out implausible ideas in order to play with their implausibility (a la Douglas Adams) but Stephenson seems to lack a sense of when he's out of his depth and ends up mangling what could be very good and important ideas (for example regarding the co-evolution of sexual behavior and sexually transmitted diseases).
It doesn't have to be this way. At the risk of starting a runaway tangent, I have to mention that David Brin, no where near as good a prose stylist as Stephenson, consistently goes the extra mile and really gets the biology right in his stories; this despite being a physics PhD, a malady that frequently causes delusions of omniscience about other branches of science. An somewhat ironic example is the reproductive biology in Brin's "Glory Season", absolutely first rate for when it was written but since then superseded by unexpected rapid advances in cloning technology.
I confess, bad science at the core of good stories is a long-running pet peeve of mine (another good tangent for another time); it's like a great orchestra with the first violin playing flat. Note to Neal: you can do better -knowing what you don't know is essential to real learning and a crucial element in the literature of ideas. Note to slashdotters: have fun with this guy's stories but keep in mind that it's not just the plots that are fiction here.
It is easy to forget, swimming in the simplified toy worlds of computer models, but it is essential to remember that biological systems are vastly deeper and more complex than are our ideas about them. As Bruce Alberts (now head of the NSF) told us long ago back in grad school, "Never forget, the cell is smarter than you are!" That stance of humility before nature has served me well in medicine and science and I think it makes for better stories as well.
For me,the most amazing thing about this book was how Gibson could just nail the nascent spirit of net hacker culture without having a clue about the underlying tech. The book is a wild mix of high-voltage prose poetry, eerily insightful takes on the feeling and attitudes of the subculture, and incredibly dumb takes on the technology involved. I read the book when it first came out in the mid-80's when I was already on the net and I was just stunned at how well this lit guy "got it." I think it will be hard to do justice to this book in the movie both since you will miss the edge of the prose and because we can no longer feel the surprise of the culture that Gibson could see so far ahead of almost anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither plan addresses victims of malpractice. The McCain plan mentions Malpractice Reform, but this is mainly about protecting doctors against abusive lawsuits. The interplay between medical and psychiatric illness is difficult and complex, and probably way beyond the scope of this thread, but in a general sense, the Obama plan's emphasis on disease prevention, health maintenance, and electronic medical records would be expected overall to decrease complication rates for people with chronic conditions such as schizophrenia. For specific suggestions on recourses, I better leave that to any lawyers reading along here. Good luck.
The New England Journal of Medicine (the pre-eminent general medical journal in the US) has a recent, thoughtful, neutral analysis of the competing plans: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/8/781
As a physician who as practiced in Infectious Disease, Internal Medicine, and Emergency Medicine, I have experienced first hand how dysfunctional is the US system of healthcare financing. Although I am not thrilled with either candidate's plan, I am convinced Obama's plan would do much more to ensure that Americans have access to affordable healthcare. This is especially true for those people (and I am guessing no small number of young-adult Slashdotters are in this category) who are currently uninsured, just gambling that they can stay healthy. Get out there and vote, folks, this is a big one.
Lise Meitner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitner
Co-discoverer of Atomic Fission
Barbara McClintock
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock
Discoverer of mobile genetic elements
These two were towering figures in science, probably behind only Curie in importance, and vastly underappreciated for a very long time -in no small measure do to their gender. McClintock finally did get the Nobel after decades of obscurity and Meitner was eventually honored with the naming of the element, Meitnerium. These are amazing stories that -speaking as a scientist and geek myself- I think any self-respecting science geek really should know.
Just to expand and clarify a bit:
1) The exact prevalence of toxoplasma infection in the world is hard to measure, but in the US, there are good measurements of the prevalence of _antibodies_ against the parasite, and these are around 50%. People with these antibodies are presumed to have been exposed and to harbor chronic latent infection. Most will never have any (known) symptoms.
2) The above is important because this latent infection can reactivate if the immune system becomes suppressed. For example, toxo encephalitis is second only to Pneumocystis pneumonia (in the US. -Second to Tuberculosis in the world at large) among severe opportunistic infections seen in AIDS.
3) It is also important since people _without_ antibodies are at risk of getting an acute infection, which can be dangerous to the fetus in a pregnant woman. This is why we measure toxo antibodies and advise pregnant, seronegative women not to change the catbox.
4) Toxo is also worth knowing about since it can occasionally cause symptomatic infection even in people with normal immune symptoms, most notably a syndrome that looks like mono (but tests negative on the "monospot").
5) This sort of life-long latent infection is quite common. Most of the world is infected with a variety of Herpes viruses, for example. In the particular case of the Herpes Simplex Viruses (HSV1 and HSV2), since they infect neurons, there has long been speculation that at least in some animals they might change the behavior of their hosts in ways that favor transmission.
6) There are also numerous known cases where parasites alter the behavior of their hosts in ways that help them spread. A few are cited in TFA. There are no proven human examples where the central nervous system is involved directly, but some common symptoms of infection involving peripheral nerve-mediated responses (e.g. sneezing) clearly have this effect.
7) host-parasite interactions have played an important role in many aspects of evolution (most obviously, the immune system) and the brain is certainly no exception. There are probably many subtle effects not yet understood, but these, involving complex behaviors, are difficult to really pin down experimentally. Therefore, it is important to be clear about what is real data (e.g. the mouse maze experiment cited in TFA) and what is speculation (e.g. that toxo may influence human emotions in a manner analogous to what was seen in mice; or that venereally spread HSV2 might influence primate sexual behavior).
Although the cited article states that the devices are implanted in the biceps, the original press release says that it is in the triceps. Also, the company web site describes the implantation as "just under the skin" (subcutaneously, i.e."sub-Q") rather than in the muscle (intramuscularly, i.e. "IM"). Triceps would make more sense if you need to get close to a wall-mounted reader. Sub-Q location would also be less painful and less dangerous, e.g. in case of infection. Just to show one can be just as geeky about wetware issues. For /.-ers not up on their anatomy, see the wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triceps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biceps_brachii
That would be "catty", I think you mean.
These independent image analysis efforts are laudable and interesting but seem to lack the psychological aspects. I think what many lay-people want most from these images is a sense of what it would look like to them if they were there themselves standing on the titanscape. This is much more complex than just stiching the images together and has a lot to do with how the brain processes visual information. For example, although the colors in the images are all pretty orange, the way the brain perceives color relies in part on subtracting out the background and seeing the _relative_ color of objects in the field of view. Also, the total level of illumination has not been defined (there was some speculation that daylight on titan would be like full moonlight on Earth), and this will influence both the spatial resolution and color perception that a human (even with dark-adapted eyes) would see. Has anyone tried to take these psychological/neurological factors into account when generating these processed images?
I was hoping someone who knows more about this than I would step in, but on the off chance that anyone is still reading this sub-thread, I think there is a deep real world principle at stake. In noisy, evolutionary simulations of the IPD, what happened in the ref I cited was that for some conditions TFT would arise and spread until all-cooperate variants could begin to proliferate under the protection of the cloud of TFT's. Once the all-C (what I called, a bit too harshly, "suckers") population reached a high enough level, all-defect (predators) swept through and caused the whole "ecosystem" to collapse into a low-payoff all-defect state. Under some conditions of noise, mutation rate, and payoff matrix, though, the "pavlov" strategy (where you make the same move if it worked well for you the last time with that partner, and make the opposite move if it did not) would arise and become stable at high overall payoff over very long simulations, much less susceptible to crashing into all-defect. "Pavlov" is perfectly willing to punish defectors, reward rational cooperates, but take advantage of naive cooperators, which made it much more stable in the long run. I think the difference between this and the recent contest is that the contest had a fixed set of entrants that could not be invaded by new all-C or all-D mutants. Without trying to oversimplify a deep subject, I would suggest an expansion of the classical population biology notions of ecological niches to include producers, predators, parasites, and policers. There is also a whole rich literature in widening the basic PD schema to include things like partial cooperation and "reputaton" building. Maybe the IPD would be fun for a real slashdot network game...
As a microbiologist with interest in evolution, I have followed this field from afar for years. Looking over the results, I was surprised at how relatively poorly "Pavlov" (win-stay lose-shift) did, since it performs so strongly in noisy, evolutionany, versions of the game. [see:c gi?hold ing=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8316296&d opt=Abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.f
It was also a bit dismaying to see how well "Grim" (hold a grudge forever) did in both games. In evolutionary versions of the game, Pavlov helps keep down the population of "suckers" (thereby decreasing the food supply for more predatory and parasitic strategies) while still rewarding "provokable" cooperators (thereby increasing the total aggregate "reward" of the ecosystem.
Also, one essential part of the payoff structure that deserves emphasis is that the payoff for cooperating has to be more than half the average of the winner and loser's payoff for defection, else one benefits by simply alternating each turn. This is a little bit like the winners did here, where they got the top spots at the cost of a lower total take for their "team". One real world example of slashdot interest where this might make sense is if you take these losses in order to eliminate your rivals from the game and then reap monopoly benefits once you control the game (not to mention any names...).
Maybe someone who has analyzed the results in more detail could comment on how the various well known strategies fared and why.
"Politzer is a pretty good and patient prof, answering questions, explaining basic physics points, etc. although one time he did get annoyed at a cocky youngster (I don't think it was you - this was 26 years ago) slouched up in the front row."
Couldn't have been me. I've always been a back row guy, and only made comments to the person sitting next to me. Also, except for a brief period needed to pass AMA95, I have never known the Stokes equation to save my life.
I'd forgotten about Gomez but your posted knocked loose a bunch of old memories. One that comes to mind relevant to this sub-thread on teaching is that he threatened to give us negative points for answers that were not only wrong, but that did not make sense. He said that anyone should be able to get an answer that was at least in the right units, with the right sign, and in the right order of magnitude. I don't know if he ever made good on this threat. I have always wanted to try this with my students but have never quite had the hard-heartedness to reallly do it.
Hey! One of these guys (Politzer) was my Phys 1 prof when I was a frosh at Caltech *cough* 27 years ago, and I actually _remember_ his explanation of asymptotic freedom to us (even though I am a only a biology guy)! I also remember Feynman's guest lecture on numerical methods for "solving" otherwise impossible problems in Quantum Mechanics (which he demonstrated with a hand calculator!). We (the undergrads) were for the most part cocky know-it-alls with no clue what a privilege it was to have these folks (and many others of their caliber) teaching us up close and personal. Now, I look back with amazement at being able to discuss/joke/plead with these folks like it was no big deal. Seriously, if there are any gung-ho Slashlings out there looking for an intense science education, Caltech is hard to beat. Of course, if hazy memory serves in this matter, more than half the class flunked that first Phys1 midterm, so this is not for the faint of heart...
To bring this back to the original topic, another part of the distortion of science by the current administration is the deliberate use of a false dichotomy between science and religion as a calculated wedge issue to whip up the evangelical base. Again, this is not a simple partisan assertion. Neither Bush senior nor Bush junior's Republican challenger, John McCain, did this sort of thing. This is a specific criticism of the current Bush administration and its terrible distortion of science.
As it happens, I have over the past several years been giving a cycle of lay-led sermons in my church on the connections between my field (biomedical science) and spirituality. Interested parties can get them from my
http://homepage.mac.com/colgrove
In the "sermons" folder. My next sermon is coming up October 3rd (on "Death"), and you are all welcome
http://www.tparkerchurch.org/
There exists a natural human tendency to apply flexible standards of evidence to emotionally charged topics: very lax standards for what is ideologically comforting but impossibly high standards of "proof" for hypotheses that are threatening to cherished beliefs. Though natural, when unchecked this process becomes terribly poisonous to reasoned debate in a democracy and it is incumbent upon citizens to push back against it, in ourselves as well as in others.
Strictly speaking, scientific theories are never proven true. Rather, scientific theories make specific falsifiable hypotheses that can be experimentally tested (though one has to avoid simplistic notions of what this entails). Reliable theories are those that have withstood many tests and have as yet failed to be falsified. Even more strictly, one can never absolutely even prove a scientific theory false; one can only force its adherents into ever more complex, tortured and ad hoc assertions in defense of the theory, trusting that as old adherents fade away and new minds view the data afresh, the implausibility of bad theories will eventually become apparent.
These notions are deep and subtle and I think honestly misunderstood by many otherwise reasonable people. Part of why the current administration is so bad with regard to science comes from the influence of those who understand the issues quite well, yet cynically use impossible demands for absolute proof as a way to block what they don't like (e.g. regulations on greenhouse gases), and absurdly low standards of evidence to promote what they want (e.g. the efficacy of of current anti-ballistic missile technology).
Part of the process of good science comes from clear and consistent definitions, so I think it is important to point out here the danger in the current vernacular use of conservative as synonomous with right-wing (and liberal with left-wing). One of the most dangerous aspects of the present administration is that policy is being shaped by right-wing radicals who are not at all conservative in the ordinary meaning of the term.
I have been paying close attention to science policy since the Nixon years. Every administration, Republican and Democrat has had serious problems with its science policy, but in my opinion, and in the opinion of many of us old enough to have been there, there has never been an adminstration where Science was so badly distorted for ideological reasons. From climate change to missile defense to abortion to environmental toxins to the teaching of evolution, the Bush administration has made science subordinate to its ideological positions.
As others in this thread have noted, the actual printed responses in the Nature article are mostly unhelpful canned PR blurbs (and it is a scary sign of ideological polarization to see Nature, the world's most prestigious general scientific journal, described as "far left"), but it is important not to lose sight of the fact that this is not just politics as usual. There are plenty of conservatives and Republicans who are friends of good science, but there is nothing conservative about the Bush administration in this regard: they are radicals, in favor of science only when it supports their ideology.
This is terribly dangerous. To paraphrase the great physicist, Richard Feynman, (whom I first heard make statements like this when I was a student at Caltech): For any technological society to succeed, sound science must take precendence over ideological conviction, because nature cannot be fooled. In my opinion, the Bush administration's failure to understand this concept presents a grave danger to our country and to the world.
(seems like a natural given the names ;^)
Seriously, though, I run a macOS&ppclinux based HIV research lab and fight a running battle with MS-centric hospital IS who keep trying to ram Windows down everyone's throats. I run my own mail server but am required as a matter of institutional policy to maintain (and read) e-mail and announcements on their Exchange/Outlook sytem. I am moving the macs to OS X and would love an Outlook replacement that interoperates with the hospital's Exhange servers but doesn't get infected with outlook viruses (bad form for a virologist).
Thanks for the pointers. As a Mac/UNIX person, I do my best to avoid Windows (in no small measure due to virus risks) and MS software in general. As such , although I occasionally have to use Office, or Outlook on some of the machines in the hospital (my own lab is all mac&linux), I am not up on the exact menus that one uses to set security standards. Is this written down in some place I could copy?
The above provides an excellent example of my point about political ranting. In the original post, I (quite deliberately) had nothing to say about the relative ecological morality of Europeans vs. Native Americans, the role of politics in the practice of science, or the objectivity and ethical responsibilities of scientists. I merely pointed out an aspect of the biology and history that struck me as interesting. I am all for working to understand the larger social context of scientific theories, but this needs to start with a real attempt to understand the data rather than a with a reflexive leap to defend pre-existing ideological positions. In the interests of full disclosure, my own ideological position is that biology is so much deeper than politics that the attempt to see the former through the narrow filter of the latter is an all too common prescription for foolishness. In the interests of staying on topic, a larger way to make my original point would be to say that the research into possible causes of the North American megafauna reminds us again of a major theme in 20th century science: a rejection of dogmatic Uniformitarianism (not Unitarianism! ;^) and a growing appreciation of the role of catastrophic events (some perhaps man-made) in shaping the modern world. Clearly this is a topic with potential political, philosophical, and even religious implications, but this is one biologist (and Unitarian!) who finds this a call for further study and reflection rather than for a tirade on slashdot.
One interesting side point on the subject of New World Mass Extinctions is its implications for how we think about Native American cultures as seen by the Europeans after Columbus. Typical European portrayals depict the Native Americans as existing in a pristine aboriginal state of Nature. What we can see now is that North America at the time of the first European colonists had actually undergone enormous environmental upheaval in the previous several thousand years. What the Europeans saw was not an original state but a hard won equilibrium. The striking harmony with nature seen in many Native American tribes was itself the product of a long process of natural selection.
As an aside, as a biologist and a grownup, I find it dispiriting to see the fraction of posts on biological topics that degenerate into sophomoric political ranting (invariably from non-biologists with a very shallow grasp of the topic). Even the simplest biological phenomenon -let alone something as complex as a whole ecology- is so much deeper and more complex that our simple political theories that it is just foolish to try to score polictical points by making the biology fit one's ideological preconceptions. Please, for the sake of the readers, keep the political ranting somewhere else and spend some time actually learning the biology.
Not just duplicating MIDI tools but rather using linux to go beyond MIDI and make software "instruments" that are rich and expressive like their acoustical brethren. I play and write for piano, voice, and recorder and have been on the hunt for good music programs at reasonable cost.
As others here have pointed out, a simpleminded projection of music into digital tools can lose as much as it gains. For example, MIDI is heavily biased toward the 12-tone equal tempered scale of modern western music. This scale is fine for most loud, busy, and only approximately tuned harmonies of most pop music (and has a number of advantages for easy key-changing) but on the other hand, the scale lacks the pure, sweet thirds and sixths that you can hear in, for example, renaissance polyphony, and comes nowhere close to the harmonic sevenths common in Barbershop and other close harmony vocal traditions.
In addition, all sorts of other scales (meantone, "well-termpered", 19-, 31-, or 53- tone equal tempered, etc.) would be great to use in music if you could switch among them as easily as MIDI lets you switch among instuments (the math regarding tuning systems is very interesting -though it tends to be a crackpot magnet- and might make a good slashdot thread. I wrote some perl->gnuplot scripts to show some of the patterns and I would post them if I wasn't averse to getting slashdotted).
Same goes for musical timbre and control of pitch overtones. All these things sound like a perfect game for musically inclined Open Source hackers. I am slowly teaching myself the computer side of things but in between my other five jobs, it is likely that others could do it a lot faster. I'd be happy to help, though, from the music side. Anybody on this case already?
OK, I'm a working scientist have known about Bruno since I was a kid scouring the local libraries for science classics. It's nice of Brin to remind people of this great hero of science but Brin mixes up his history with his prejudice when he writes:
"Many of his other writings now seem silly, deliberately provocative, or just perplexingly obscure, such as his doctrine of panpsychism (belief that reality is constituted by the mind), which anticipated the teachings of Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza."
Bruno was indeed one of the great Pantheist philosophers (and this was no small part of what got him in trouble with the church) but Dr. Brin surely must know that there are plenty of us thoroughly modern science-types quite sympathetic to pantheist views of the Universe and who see nothing silly or obscure about them. Brin lets his own anti-religious biases delude him into assuming that any self-respecting modern would share his blithe dismissal of Bruno's metaphysics. Here, he makes a classic error, confusing science and philosophy and his personal tastes with universal standards of reason. No one reads Bruno or Gallileo anymore to learn the science; science has progressed beyond them. In contrast, many wise people still find much of value in the philosophical writings of the great philosophers of antiquity. If I were Brin, I'd be a little more humble, for example, about casually blowing off the beliefs of Liebniz and Spinoza, two of the sharpest minds of all time. Maybe they were just silly but I would argue that the burden of proof for this assertion would weigh heavily on Brin. Brin should just stick to the history and leave his metaphysical tastes somewhere else. Also, while we are on the subject of Martyrs to Reason, and speaking as a good church going, choir singing, sunday school teaching Unitarian pantheist, maybe Brin should have Bruno meet up with Michael Servetus, theologian, philosopher, and physician, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and burned at the stake by Calvin himself for championing the Unitarian heresy of the oneness of God. (I'd give the links but I don't want to get slashdotted).
This one really takes me back. We used to run a pirate hacked together FM station (KKAL, no relation to the legit Berkeley station) at a glorious 1 watt out of a broom closet in Page House at Caltech back in the mid 70's. We had live music (sometimes pretty good but sometimes as lame as me on the tenor recorder with a mike on a long cord to the basement tunnels). We wrote our own soap opera (Maggie's Farm), and had outrageous commentary on all sorts of things we didn't have enough sense not to say. At 7 AM during finals week we would broadcast the official theme song of finals, "The Ride of the Valkyries", and the EE majors would try to one up one another with enormous homebuilt speakers throughout the campus. On a good night, with a good antenna, you could pick up KKAL throughout much of the surrounding ritzy San Marino neighborhood. When I went back to Tech a few years ago (not -gasp- looking like somebody's parent), the old KKAL closet was gone and replaced with a bank of terminals where people were playing computer games. Sic Transit Gloria Emmcee, I guess. Any recent techers know what happened to KKAL?
Jon Katz asks for biologists to comment. I'm a biologist and my research (HIV virus drug resistance) involves Darwinian evolution about as directly as one ever sees it on human time scales. That said, in my experience, Darwinian reasoning applied to cultural phenomena are mostly dis-analogies: just similar enough to mislead and obscure rather than illuminate and explain. They are more often than not just modern myth-making masquerading as science, a haven for lazy, armchair speculators. An often repeated complaint among evolutionary biologists is that it is the field of science with the largest number of people who think they understand it but don't. In the case of information, as others have pointed out already, human attention is finite and limiting and serves to winnow what information is saved and transmitted. There is a crude evolutionary analogy here but it does not in my opinion get you any further than just good sense. There may be interesting evolutionary facets to how we as social primates deal or don't deal with abundant information but that is a different subject. In addition, the notion of attention as an important rate-limiting step in modern human culture is interesting but is hardly original and only tenuously connected to evolution. There are many lifetimes of good honest work to be had in the study of real evolution without treking into lame cultural analogies.
Here is the sense in which it is confirmation:
1) The existence of the planet was _inferred_ from spectography of the star, showing doppler shifts consistent with a wobble caused by an unseen planetary companion.
2) The size and periodicity of the wobble allowed the researchers to _predict_ the size, and period of the planet's orbit.
3) The existence of the planet was _confirmed_ by finding a photometric dimming of light from the star, consistent with transit of a gas giant planet, at exactly the time and periodicity _predicted_ by the spectography.
The chance that two _independent_ means of detection would give the _same_ predictions for the inferred planet is remote and provides very strong evidence for the reality of the planet. This is a very important result and a very nice piece of science.
Speaking as a working scientist, I think it is also a very nice demonstration of how how science works in the real world, too often misunderstood even by the techies on slashdot.
Glad to see the Snow Crash review. I was thinking of writing one myself but this allows me to make the basic point more briefly.
[Stephenson and I are just about the same vintage and with similar computing experience but in Real Life (TM), I am a physician and medical researcher on the molecular biology of HIV.]
When Stephenson is on the razzle, he is a hoot to read, throwing off cute quips and wild ideas at warp speed. Sadly, like a lot of glib, witty people, he seems to fall in love with his own patter (the curse of the Raconteur )and often loses any sense of when he doesn't know what he is talking about.
His political ideas are his own opinions and his computing ideas are fine as far as I can tell as a non-expert (in distinction to William Gibson, who got the feel of the cypberpunk world dead on while remaining clueless about the technology itself). His takes on ancient history are also more than a little idiosyncratic but again this is not my territory. What is annoying to me is that he makes a big deal about some biomedical topics with a very poor understanding of the underlying science. In particular, the biological basis of the wetare crash is highly implausible and his speculations on the evolution of viruses are just dumb.
It's worse than that because the underlying ideas are quite interesting -though hardly original- and would make great story fodder for someone willing to learn the material. It's fine not to become expert in subjects that are peripheral to one's work and it's fine to throw out implausible ideas in order to play with their implausibility (a la Douglas Adams) but Stephenson seems to lack a sense of when he's out of his depth and ends up mangling what could be very good and important ideas (for example regarding the co-evolution of sexual behavior and sexually transmitted diseases).
It doesn't have to be this way. At the risk of starting a runaway tangent, I have to mention that David Brin, no where near as good a prose stylist as Stephenson, consistently goes the extra mile and really gets the biology right in his stories; this despite being a physics PhD, a malady that frequently causes delusions of omniscience about other branches of science. An somewhat ironic example is the reproductive biology in Brin's "Glory Season", absolutely first rate for when it was written but since then superseded by unexpected rapid advances in cloning technology.
I confess, bad science at the core of good stories is a long-running pet peeve of mine (another good tangent for another time); it's like a great orchestra with the first violin playing flat. Note to Neal: you can do better -knowing what you don't know is essential to real learning and a crucial element in the literature of ideas. Note to slashdotters: have fun with this guy's stories but keep in mind that it's not just the plots that are fiction here.
It is easy to forget, swimming in the simplified toy worlds of computer models, but it is essential to remember that biological systems are vastly deeper and more complex than are our ideas about them. As Bruce Alberts (now head of the NSF) told us long ago back in grad school, "Never forget, the cell is smarter than you are!" That stance of humility before nature has served me well in medicine and science and I think it makes for better stories as well.
For me,the most amazing thing about this book was how Gibson could just nail the nascent spirit of net hacker culture without having a clue about the underlying tech. The book is a wild mix of high-voltage prose poetry, eerily insightful takes on the feeling and attitudes of the subculture, and incredibly dumb takes on the technology involved. I read the book when it first came out in the mid-80's when I was already on the net and I was just stunned at how well this lit guy "got it." I think it will be hard to do justice to this book in the movie both since you will miss the edge of the prose and because we can no longer feel the surprise of the culture that Gibson could see so far ahead of almost anyone else.