The study says that lead levels are LINKED, slightly, to lower IQs. It says little about causation.
While the researchers do say on a few occasions, correctly, that lead is a toxin which may be affecting children, it appears as if they correctly realize that their study is correlative and cannot be directly linked, therefore, to causation.
All studies that deal with correlation cannot be linked to causation because the experimenters do not have direct control over the independant variable, nor can they tell which variable is independant in some cases. While the researchers did control for a variety of things in this experiment (The study followed 172 children in the Rochester, N.Y., area whose blood lead was assessed at 6, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months, and who were tested for IQ at both 3 and 5 years of age. The researchers controlled for many other factors that contribute to a child's intellectual functioning, such as birth weight, mother's intelligence, income, education, and amount of stimulation in the home)... it appears that they did not account for lead exposure by location - the first thing I might suggest.
For instance, suppose that equal income housing varies greatly in Rochester, NY, and that certain children are growing up in worse or older neighborhoods than others? These worse neighborhoods might have a higher lead exposure than others, which might cause the subsequent decline more than the lead.
Obviously, the children must be getting lead exposure from somewhere - have they accounted for school district (lead piping or building location of a particular school)?
It's not that I don't believe in the study, I'd just be hesitant to scream causality.
Just for your own info- It's very hard to patent DNA sequences. It's a very difficult case to argue. Sure, you could point out many exceptions, but on the whole, it's a difficult thing to do.
However, I think that you ought to step back and realize what you're saying. Medicine is a commerical endeavor, just like everything else. The guys who made this discovery need to eat tomorrow night, just like the guys who have SARS need medical attention. If we didn't pay them for it, we'd never have people doing new things, because no one would live a comfortable lifestyle for a large achievement.
I'm not saying I agree with the patenting of the research, especially in the fields of biotechnology. But, there are some serious implications you're talking about - if we start trying to make it impossible to patent techniques, etc, then we're essentially destroying a very profitable and very rewarding industry - both for community health and for the people who do the work.
Well, part of the "secret" of how cancer cells slip by immune system responses deals with their mutation from normal, working human cells.
Cell surface antigens are very complicated, but suffice it to say, they're somewhat unique based on a variety of different factors (a similar analogy: people can't recieve blood from other "types", the "types" being different "types" of a specific surface antigens).
Since cancer cells arise from mutated cells, there might not be a marked difference in surface antigens on the cells - and that's why the immune system fails to realize the mishap. It's a bit like this: Suppose you were to put one blue marble in a jar of yellow marbles and tell someone to pick it out by the way it "felt" different. T-cells aren't capable of seeing the big picture, they only focus on specific chemical reactions - namely, recognition of foreign bodies through foreign antigens and their destruction.
AIDS works in a similar way - fooling T cells into "missing" infected cells and virus particles as foreign bodies in the system. My concern is that fooling with T-cells is an awful risk in terms of autoimmune disorder - no matter how fast cancer kills you, autoimmune disorders can do irreparable damage in a relatively short amount of time. I hope the research, when it finally progresses into human trials, is so safe that they don't have to worry about this sort of thing.
"Tweaking white blood cells so that they do their job more effectively would be a far better answer, since they wouldn't attack healthy tissue."
Right, sure, that sounds very good on paper. The problem is, T cells work by recognizing surface antigens present on certain cells and not on others, or the absence of certain key antigens. I think autoimmune issues will be the *first* to occur - we're teaching someone's T cells how to kill cells in his own body, granted, cells that have been mutated in some way, but still.
I'm not so sure this will work in vivo as well as it has in vitro.:-\
The article does give some very interesting statistics, but I'd be interested to know if any Astronomers can estimate how many Volkswagen Bugs this fungus might occupy...
Right, which is why I was saying the finding was noteworthy and significant instead of shooting it down simply because they haven't "proven" anything. =P
You've "easily" proven things by defining them as something. An irrational number is a number with no known, infinite, repeatable sequence? You've *defined* it that way, that doesn't mean you've ever *proven* a number irrational.
People are still doing work on Pi to see if it's got repeatable, discernable patterns someplace. The application of Logic does not prove things, proof cannot be generated with interpolation/extrapolation. In the scientific community, proof is established by repeated experimental repetition, in Mathematics, testing this theory lots of times with lots of different numbers (see computers). A Geometry proof, for instance, is an elegant placement of existing theorems to define a new one. "A works and B works and C works, therefore, D works." A Geometry *theorem* or *testable observation* is the creation of a new foundation that can be built from.
Of course they're noteworthy. Who are you to say that the editors of Nature don't know what to publish?
In Mathematics, there's nothing that's "proven" that isn't explicitly defined as such. Notice how the Pythagorean Theorem is just that - a Theorem, not 'The Pythagorean Law'.
The reason - it's impossible to prove anything on an infinite set of data that isn't defined in the parameters of the data set.
A Theorem is a tested hypothesis, and these guys aren't even offering this. They're simply saying, "Look, we found an interesting pattern." As someone who's hopefully a future scientist, I'd say this is noteworthy - some scientists in the community noticed something interesting and submitted it so lots of other scientists could attempt to validate the claim.
It's not *trivial*, if it was, why hasn't it been done before?
Post title pretty much says it all. Every network registered computer is required to register with it's MAC address, which is kept in a big system, which controls access.
I know this is how it works, because people ask me all the time, "Dan, can you hook my internet back up?", and I tell them, "No, not without switching your ethernet card or calling ITS (information technology services)."
I think we ought to make virus-protection code public and government funded.
I know way too many people who can't afford 50 bucks on a virus scanner or decent firewall software in College, and I saw Nimda infections up until the end of last year.
If people could get this type of thing for free - money that would ultimately ensure the safety of the net at large - I think it should be done.
It's a play on the Latin word for our english "Obelisk", just like "Asterix" is a play on "Aster", the star.
There are other characters with other similar latinate names, as the show is a cartoon that also intends to teach classical history - it gets reprinted in almost (maybe "more than"?) a dozen languages and actually gets used in Latin classes in the states.
You're missing the point. You changed the form of the thing when you tried to fit it into a computer analogy.
It's a serious biological discovery, in some respects - it makes the DNA system more plausible on early earth, and it's a much simpler system which DNA could have grown out of.
Your analogy makes this sound like wasted effort "just to prove it's possible", their work is part of research to explain the evolution of the genome.
One of the reasons, as proven in social psychology research: crowding acts as an arousing agent. Crowding has been shown to heighten a situational reaction, i.e., if you're going to the store to go buy things, you're more likely to do so if everyone around you is bustling about doing the same thing.
Not only that, but the crowds in the stores make customers fall for their gimmicks (buy one, get one free; buy one, get a free silver platter). They also subject the customer to huge amounts of other kinds of marketing.
It's absurd that a company can consider a 200 million dollar loss "acceptable" and continue operating (under the same management) with plans for expansion.
This reeks of the ability to undercut the console market.
And this seems like an awefully ridiculous way to cure the problem of Carp.
First of all, the fish that can't produce females have to have a reproductive advantage. By this, I mean that the fish have to get to the eggs "first" or gain preferential mating, otherwise, say, after the first year, the percentage of daughterless carp will be the same as the year before. Why would it change?
Not only this, but since half of the zygote has normal genes (presumably, they're treating males - females wouldn't be alive in the second generation to pass on the 'bad' genes) - there's no way to really eradicate the fish. Basically, it's like this: Say you have 500 people, 250 of which are male, 250 of which are female. 50 of those males can't have female offspring because of a genetic defect. 200 of those males can. Not only will they have normal female offspring, but the 200 males will also have 'un-tainted' male offspring. In the f2, then, the ratios don't neccessarily change towards the better - half of the fertilized fish are normal males and the female population is slightly reduced - however, all of those females can mate with normal males and have more females.
This will take YEARS to have a noticeable effect on the Carp population. The ratio of 1/5 carp with that daughterless gene is ridiculously high, they'd have to release thousands of the fish into the wild and drastically *increase* the population in order to decrease it. This article sounds more like sensationalism than science.
Will the Linux version cost less because they're not offering tech support with it. or will it just be community-support-based, like every other product? And, if it is going to be community based, are they going to "provide the space"?
I can understand why no tech support - every user has 1239880198231 different configurations. But it seems that if they're not going to be providing a valuable source of information (just because you're a geek doesn't mean you've never called tech support, everyone has), they ought to do two things: A) Establish a community space for the Linux Gamers on their site to allow questions that pertain to the Linux Version(s) to be answered and/or B) provide source for some pieces of the program.
Since most people use these types of games to play online anyway, if they have a secure system for validating keys (see battle.net), they shouldn't have to worry about open-sourcing parts of (or the entire) client.
Slashdot Mirror
The study says that lead levels are LINKED, slightly, to lower IQs. It says little about causation.
While the researchers do say on a few occasions, correctly, that lead is a toxin which may be affecting children, it appears as if they correctly realize that their study is correlative and cannot be directly linked, therefore, to causation.
All studies that deal with correlation cannot be linked to causation because the experimenters do not have direct control over the independant variable, nor can they tell which variable is independant in some cases. While the researchers did control for a variety of things in this experiment (The study followed 172 children in the Rochester, N.Y., area whose blood lead was assessed at 6, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months, and who were tested for IQ at both 3 and 5 years of age. The researchers controlled for many other factors that contribute to a child's intellectual functioning, such as birth weight, mother's intelligence, income, education, and amount of stimulation in the home)... it appears that they did not account for lead exposure by location - the first thing I might suggest.
For instance, suppose that equal income housing varies greatly in Rochester, NY, and that certain children are growing up in worse or older neighborhoods than others? These worse neighborhoods might have a higher lead exposure than others, which might cause the subsequent decline more than the lead.
Obviously, the children must be getting lead exposure from somewhere - have they accounted for school district (lead piping or building location of a particular school)?
It's not that I don't believe in the study, I'd just be hesitant to scream causality.
Yes, but it's legal to patent lots of other things, which can be claimed derived from the DNA sequence.
Just for your own info-
It's very hard to patent DNA sequences. It's a very difficult case to argue. Sure, you could point out many exceptions, but on the whole, it's a difficult thing to do.
However, I think that you ought to step back and realize what you're saying. Medicine is a commerical endeavor, just like everything else. The guys who made this discovery need to eat tomorrow night, just like the guys who have SARS need medical attention. If we didn't pay them for it, we'd never have people doing new things, because no one would live a comfortable lifestyle for a large achievement.
I'm not saying I agree with the patenting of the research, especially in the fields of biotechnology. But, there are some serious implications you're talking about - if we start trying to make it impossible to patent techniques, etc, then we're essentially destroying a very profitable and very rewarding industry - both for community health and for the people who do the work.
Angel Attack! NERV! Get Shinji Ikari down here right away!
Er... err... no?
Well, part of the "secret" of how cancer cells slip by immune system responses deals with their mutation from normal, working human cells.
Cell surface antigens are very complicated, but suffice it to say, they're somewhat unique based on a variety of different factors (a similar analogy: people can't recieve blood from other "types", the "types" being different "types" of a specific surface antigens).
Since cancer cells arise from mutated cells, there might not be a marked difference in surface antigens on the cells - and that's why the immune system fails to realize the mishap. It's a bit like this: Suppose you were to put one blue marble in a jar of yellow marbles and tell someone to pick it out by the way it "felt" different. T-cells aren't capable of seeing the big picture, they only focus on specific chemical reactions - namely, recognition of foreign bodies through foreign antigens and their destruction.
AIDS works in a similar way - fooling T cells into "missing" infected cells and virus particles as foreign bodies in the system. My concern is that fooling with T-cells is an awful risk in terms of autoimmune disorder - no matter how fast cancer kills you, autoimmune disorders can do irreparable damage in a relatively short amount of time. I hope the research, when it finally progresses into human trials, is so safe that they don't have to worry about this sort of thing.
"Tweaking white blood cells so that they do their job more effectively would be a far better answer, since they wouldn't attack healthy tissue."
:-\
Right, sure, that sounds very good on paper. The problem is, T cells work by recognizing surface antigens present on certain cells and not on others, or the absence of certain key antigens. I think autoimmune issues will be the *first* to occur - we're teaching someone's T cells how to kill cells in his own body, granted, cells that have been mutated in some way, but still.
I'm not so sure this will work in vivo as well as it has in vitro.
The article does give some very interesting statistics, but I'd be interested to know if any Astronomers can estimate how many Volkswagen Bugs this fungus might occupy...
Right, which is why I was saying the finding was noteworthy and significant instead of shooting it down simply because they haven't "proven" anything. =P
There, you've done it.
You've "easily" proven things by defining them as something. An irrational number is a number with no known, infinite, repeatable sequence? You've *defined* it that way, that doesn't mean you've ever *proven* a number irrational.
People are still doing work on Pi to see if it's got repeatable, discernable patterns someplace. The application of Logic does not prove things, proof cannot be generated with interpolation/extrapolation. In the scientific community, proof is established by repeated experimental repetition, in Mathematics, testing this theory lots of times with lots of different numbers (see computers). A Geometry proof, for instance, is an elegant placement of existing theorems to define a new one. "A works and B works and C works, therefore, D works." A Geometry *theorem* or *testable observation* is the creation of a new foundation that can be built from.
Of course they're noteworthy. Who are you to say that the editors of Nature don't know what to publish?
In Mathematics, there's nothing that's "proven" that isn't explicitly defined as such. Notice how the Pythagorean Theorem is just that - a Theorem, not 'The Pythagorean Law'.
The reason - it's impossible to prove anything on an infinite set of data that isn't defined in the parameters of the data set.
A Theorem is a tested hypothesis, and these guys aren't even offering this. They're simply saying, "Look, we found an interesting pattern." As someone who's hopefully a future scientist, I'd say this is noteworthy - some scientists in the community noticed something interesting and submitted it so lots of other scientists could attempt to validate the claim.
It's not *trivial*, if it was, why hasn't it been done before?
We'll probably be bombing people at that time. We wouldn't want to divide our brilliant minds between science and bombing, would we?
PUSH A000
POP ES
Were you trying to embed a message about children's lollipops?
You know that garbage compactor from starwars?
Yeah. My Machine once fell in there, and I dove down a chute on a prison block to save it. Funny thing is, everyone thought I was rescuing a princess.
Post title pretty much says it all. Every network registered computer is required to register with it's MAC address, which is kept in a big system, which controls access.
I know this is how it works, because people ask me all the time, "Dan, can you hook my internet back up?", and I tell them, "No, not without switching your ethernet card or calling ITS (information technology services)."
I use things like "shift-home backspace" to delete entire lines.
They're useful keys when you're editing, if you have them bound right.
And, er, you're not using Emacs. =P
I think we ought to make virus-protection code public and government funded.
I know way too many people who can't afford 50 bucks on a virus scanner or decent firewall software in College, and I saw Nimda infections up until the end of last year.
If people could get this type of thing for free - money that would ultimately ensure the safety of the net at large - I think it should be done.
It's a play on the Latin word for our english "Obelisk", just like "Asterix" is a play on "Aster", the star.
There are other characters with other similar latinate names, as the show is a cartoon that also intends to teach classical history - it gets reprinted in almost (maybe "more than"?) a dozen languages and actually gets used in Latin classes in the states.
Why does everyone with a computer think they're a critic? =P
You're missing the point. You changed the form of the thing when you tried to fit it into a computer analogy.
It's a serious biological discovery, in some respects - it makes the DNA system more plausible on early earth, and it's a much simpler system which DNA could have grown out of.
Your analogy makes this sound like wasted effort "just to prove it's possible", their work is part of research to explain the evolution of the genome.
One of the reasons, as proven in social psychology research: crowding acts as an arousing agent. Crowding has been shown to heighten a situational reaction, i.e., if you're going to the store to go buy things, you're more likely to do so if everyone around you is bustling about doing the same thing.
Not only that, but the crowds in the stores make customers fall for their gimmicks (buy one, get one free; buy one, get a free silver platter). They also subject the customer to huge amounts of other kinds of marketing.
Crowds HELP stores, not hurt customers.
and watch hundreds of lego masterpieces burn and melt as the webserver on the adjacent desk has a small thermonuclear meltdown.
:(
Anyone have a mirror?
Not to mention redefine "Monopoly".
It's absurd that a company can consider a 200 million dollar loss "acceptable" and continue operating (under the same management) with plans for expansion.
This reeks of the ability to undercut the console market.
And this seems like an awefully ridiculous way to cure the problem of Carp.
First of all, the fish that can't produce females have to have a reproductive advantage. By this, I mean that the fish have to get to the eggs "first" or gain preferential mating, otherwise, say, after the first year, the percentage of daughterless carp will be the same as the year before. Why would it change?
Not only this, but since half of the zygote has normal genes (presumably, they're treating males - females wouldn't be alive in the second generation to pass on the 'bad' genes) - there's no way to really eradicate the fish. Basically, it's like this: Say you have 500 people, 250 of which are male, 250 of which are female. 50 of those males can't have female offspring because of a genetic defect. 200 of those males can. Not only will they have normal female offspring, but the 200 males will also have 'un-tainted' male offspring. In the f2, then, the ratios don't neccessarily change towards the better - half of the fertilized fish are normal males and the female population is slightly reduced - however, all of those females can mate with normal males and have more females.
This will take YEARS to have a noticeable effect on the Carp population. The ratio of 1/5 carp with that daughterless gene is ridiculously high, they'd have to release thousands of the fish into the wild and drastically *increase* the population in order to decrease it. This article sounds more like sensationalism than science.
Just my opinion.
And when I read that, at first I thought of "Cal-Tech", you know, the school.
I wondered for a moment what Apple was doing holding Cal-Tech hostage. Hrm.
Will the Linux version cost less because they're not offering tech support with it. or will it just be community-support-based, like every other product? And, if it is going to be community based, are they going to "provide the space"?
I can understand why no tech support - every user has 1239880198231 different configurations. But it seems that if they're not going to be providing a valuable source of information (just because you're a geek doesn't mean you've never called tech support, everyone has), they ought to do two things: A) Establish a community space for the Linux Gamers on their site to allow questions that pertain to the Linux Version(s) to be answered and/or B) provide source for some pieces of the program.
Since most people use these types of games to play online anyway, if they have a secure system for validating keys (see battle.net), they shouldn't have to worry about open-sourcing parts of (or the entire) client.