I doubt these kind of issues can be singled out by a blood test.
Yet another study to take with a large grain of salt. This "news" is a press release. Has it been reported in a medical journal? Has it been replicated by other researchers?
The researchers say they found abnormal cholinesterase levels in 4 groups of people:
"women, African-American, people with low Body Mass Index (BMI) and people who have suffered a previous trauma in their lives"
Perhaps they have weighted their sample with people generally more prone to anxiety. For example, people with some eating disorders may have a very low Body Mass Index. So it's not clear what is cause and what is effect.
Abnormal xACHe levels may be a marker for anxiety, or they may be a marker for some other factors that pre-dispose to anxiety.
About 25 years ago, a blood test was trumpeted as diagnostic for depression. I wonder where the DST (dexamethasone suppression test) is today?
Just go to the musty bookshelves of one's university to the mathematics section and look for books before 1970. Many of them will have an acknowledgement of funding through some agency such as the Office of Navel Research.
Not just mathematics but also computer science, including some of the *big names* in the field.
US News and World Report and Newsweek are both running interesting articles on how personal tape players are a major contributor [US News] to early hearing loss [Newsweek].
Actually this is an AP wire service story also reported on CNN.
While the authors note that noise induced hearing loss related to exposure to personal stereo systems does not show up on routine hearing tests, they claim that more sensitive tests (OAEs) do detect an effect.
Note that their study is retrospective and exposure data comes from self-reporting. [They gathered a bunch of OAE tests and did regression analysis on data from history forms and questionnaires obtained at the time.]
It's an interesting study. Noise from personal stereo systems probably is a risk factor. But this study doesn't quantify the risk and the exposure data is "soft". This is far from saying that "personal tape players are a major contributor to early hearing loss" as claimed.
Re:MOD REVIEW DOWN! TROLL!
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 1
The interviews in the book back this up; it contains example after example of people who started with modest porn searching online, then graduated to more heinous stuff.
What the fuck is this garbage?
Good question.
How can anyone write a review without answering some basic journalistic questions? Who is the author? (An editor at American Demographics Magazine - a magazine that explores marketing trends.) What is her expertise? (She wrote a book on "Starter Marriages", she is divorced.). Who is the publisher? (Time books - the author is a columnist for Time Magazine).
Anecdotal evidence is about as reliable as drawing conclusions about society from watching Oprah or Maury.
Like it or hate it, IQ tests are reasonably good predictors of one's potential precisely because they are normalized to function in precisely that way.
And psychometrists spend enormous amounts of time, money and energy making sure that IQ tests actually measure something.
IMO opinion there is no question that there are differences between racial groups or between the sexes in various things. Saying that all people must be the same in various ways because political doctrine says this is so makes as much sense as maintaining that the sun revolves around the earth because church authorities say that it is so.
If you look at relatively un-controversial things like gene frequences or HLA types or blood types you will find racial differences.
Why does the US military use IQ tests? Because they work. And believe it or not at heart US armed forces are not prejudiced as an institution. What matters is the mission and getting the job done. The military is one of the largest and strictest meritocracies around.
While I'm sure many people here will make jokes about Windows 95, it was quite a leap in stability and usablility from windows 3.1.
One major improvement was going from co-operative multi-tasking to pre-emptive multi-tasking. On Win 3.1 applications had to relinquish the CPU.
Personally I think Win 95 has aged better than Mick Jagger. It's a big let down from doing a commercial for Microsoft to being the background music for Ameriquest Mortgage. (Whoever thay are.)
an email from Phil Barrett (lead developer of windows 3.1):
heh, heh, heh . . . my proposal is to have bambi refuse to run this alien OS ? Comments ? The approach we take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load.
There are other examples and evidence, but this is one of the most damning.
1) It was certainly well known among developers that Microsoft's own software had access to undocumented parts of the API. This was certainly true in DOS and in Win 3.1.
2) I'm amused when I run early versions of Quick Basic on my Win XP box and get the error message which says (paraphrased) "Boo hoo, you are not running genuine MS-DOS. Do you wish to continue at your own risk since we can't gaurantee that the program will work properly, etc....."
I can't stand taxes which are for some specific purpose. A tax is a tax. All the money should go into a big pool
That's what you get when a political party supports using taxation as an instrument of social policy.
The basic idea is that "sin taxes" will be used to combat the "sin" being taxed. The underlying idea is that some elitist politician thinks he knows what's good for you.
Let me cite an example that most readers of this site can understand. Back in the 60s there was an original Star Trek episode called "A Piece of the Action". It was set on a planet which imitated Chicago during the gangster era of the 20s. [Probably that set was free at Paramount that day....] At the end of the episode, the crew makes peace between the warring gang factions, and informs them that "The Federation is taking over." and that a starship will be dispatched each your to the planet to pick up the Federation's "cut". The explanation is that this money will be put back into the planetary treasury so that people will eventually be reformed in spite of themselves.
What was that turbo button for? IIRC, it didn't do... anything. At all. On any operating system.
It's related to a switch once found on the insides of a PDP-10 at the AI lab at MIT. This switch had two positions, "magic" and "more magic". Although there was only one wire leading to the switch, when the switch was toggled the computer crashed.... several times.
The OS/2 userbase was totally shocked upon hearing this news from IBM. He then went to the fridge and got a soda.
Actually there are a number of developers still using OS/2 and there is also a connection to Open Source - Open Watcom. Open Watcom lets you cross develop for Win32, Win16, extended DOS, DOS and OS/2 in either C/C++ or Fortran 77 (lots of 90ish extensions).
TFA was talking about clinical studies published in medical journals like JAMA and the New england Journal of Medicine.
At one time the NEJM was considered a "gold standard" in publishing medical research. IMO, that's no longer true. I do believe that journals are no longer as careful about what they publish. [Rhetorical question- why did Marcia Angell leave as editor of the NEJM?]
While we do expect "science" to eventually verify or refute claims made in scientific studies, I do not remember such a high percentage of studies being "overturned", as the lawyers would say. [Of course I am susceptible to "recall bias.:-)!]
Along with journals more willing to print research, I do believe that the quality of research itself has worsened. [I've seen first hand some of the "fun and games" that take place in academia. That's one reason I'm no longer there!]
In addition, the public's hunger for news about health and lifestyle and the media's need for sensationalism have fueled a news feeding frenzy. I doubt that the public or the news media are really capable of judging the worth of clinical studies. I don't think the public or the media understand the medicine or science involved nor do they actually know how to evaluate research on scientific, methodological or statistical grounds.
I get really peeved when I see some study touted on TV that reports a 10% reduction in some disease supposedly caused by modifying some risk factor. Without seeing the confidence interval bouding this estimate of risk, I'm not willing to say the effect is real. As a rule of thumb, I was taught to view with skepticism any study that does not halve or double the relative risk attributed to a risk factor.
With a modicum of thought (ie consider it is the same force accelerating both of them) you should realise that it's very plausible that the vomit will strike the coaster again somewhere near the bottom, offset slightly by whatever horizontal inertia the vomit had (which might be quite small, for many roller coasters).
Calculating exactly where the vomit will hit the coaster (ignoring air friction, as always) sounds like a really interesting basic problem to give students learning Newtonian mechanics.;) As would a variation on a standard ballistic trajectory problem once posed in a physics class. "A boy stands 2 feet from a toilet..."
Re:Actually....One Thousand Six Hundred and Sixtee
on
The New C Standard
·
· Score: 1
1616 pages
The latest Harbison & Steele is only 560 pages long.
It is very very humbling to think about all those teams sitting around calculating the sine and log for the damned tables.
At the time, and even into the era of electro-mechanical computers and mechanical desk calculators, the main principle involved was computing formulas by means of differences. See Abramowitz & Stegun for a whole host of formulas.
Back when new math was coming into vogue, I was taught a simple method for determining the degree of a series of numbers - take differences between adjacent terms and repeat the process until the terms have a constant difference. The number of times you do this gives you the degree of the polynomial involved.
In a similar manner, very complex tables can be created just by adding up high order differences, then combining them over and over again until you generate the entries in a table.
Likewise, there are all sorts of interpolation formulas which allow you to refine the entries in the table, some of course are directly related to Taylor series expansions.
The key here is by using differences, you can reduce the strength of the calculation from multiplication and division to a series of additions and subtractions by accumulating terms. Of course you have to be very careful to keep the propagation of errors in mind!
It's sad, in a way, that a whole set of formulas, particularly in trigonometry, have been rendered obsolete by the electronic calculator. While I have not used a slide rule for 30 years and have not used trig/log tables for much longer, I think that people do miss out on a depth of understanding by not doing manual calculations. Using a slide rule gives you a feel for estimating results and keeping people from being fooled by a large number of significant digits. Likewise, I know I have a better understanding of what it took to navigate the seas with tables and instruments.
Each neuron is like a tiny, slow analog DSP, feeding back FM around a base frequency
1. Look up the original studies of visual perception and you will see that this is so. Visual perception is built upon multiple layers of neurons, each of which acts like a filter.
2. Neurons can modulate their own level of excitability. IIRC they change their reactiveness to cAMP.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt these kind of issues can be singled out by a blood test.
Yet another study to take with a large grain of salt. This "news" is a press release. Has it been reported in a medical journal? Has it been replicated by other researchers?
The researchers say they found abnormal cholinesterase levels in 4 groups of people:
"women, African-American, people with low Body Mass Index (BMI) and people who have suffered a previous trauma in their lives"
Perhaps they have weighted their sample with people generally more prone to anxiety. For example, people with some eating disorders may have a very low Body Mass Index. So it's not clear what is cause and what is effect.
Abnormal xACHe levels may be a marker for anxiety, or they may be a marker for some other factors that pre-dispose to anxiety.
About 25 years ago, a blood test was trumpeted as diagnostic for depression. I wonder where the DST (dexamethasone suppression test) is today?
What about feeding, clothing and educating more than half of the planet?
I do live next door to the farmers who do feed most of the planet.
Have a nice day!
Just go to the musty bookshelves of one's university to the mathematics section and look for books before 1970. Many of them will have an acknowledgement of funding through some agency such as the Office of Navel Research.
Not just mathematics but also computer science, including some of the *big names* in the field.
US News and World Report and Newsweek are both running interesting articles on how personal tape players are a major contributor [US News] to early hearing loss [Newsweek].
/ lepage.html
Actually this is an AP wire service story also reported on CNN.
You can read the original research at
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/xmas98/lepage
While the authors note that noise induced hearing loss related to exposure to personal stereo systems does not show up on routine hearing tests, they claim that more sensitive tests (OAEs) do detect an effect.
Note that their study is retrospective and exposure data comes from self-reporting. [They gathered a bunch of OAE tests and did regression analysis on data from history forms and questionnaires obtained at the time.]
It's an interesting study. Noise from personal stereo systems probably is a risk factor. But this study doesn't quantify the risk and the exposure data is "soft". This is far from saying that "personal tape players are a major contributor to early hearing loss" as claimed.
The interviews in the book back this up; it contains example after example of people who started with modest porn searching online, then graduated to more heinous stuff.
What the fuck is this garbage?
Good question.
How can anyone write a review without answering some basic journalistic questions? Who is the author? (An editor at American Demographics Magazine - a magazine that explores marketing trends.) What is her expertise? (She wrote a book on "Starter Marriages", she is divorced.). Who is the publisher? (Time books - the author is a columnist for Time Magazine).
Anecdotal evidence is about as reliable as drawing conclusions about society from watching Oprah or Maury.
So long Slashdot, it was fun.
It's quite common for parasites to change a host's behaviour. There are parasites which change the behaviour of their human hosts.
Spirochetes have been doing this for millions of years.
(Q: What killed Al Capone?)
Like it or hate it, IQ tests are reasonably good predictors of one's potential precisely because they are normalized to function in precisely that way.
And psychometrists spend enormous amounts of time, money and energy making sure that IQ tests actually measure something.
IMO opinion there is no question that there are differences between racial groups or between the sexes in various things. Saying that all people must be the same in various ways because political doctrine says this is so makes as much sense as maintaining that the sun revolves around the earth because church authorities say that it is so.
If you look at relatively un-controversial things like gene frequences or HLA types or blood types you will find racial differences.
Why does the US military use IQ tests? Because they work. And believe it or not at heart US armed forces are not prejudiced as an institution. What matters is the mission and getting the job done. The military is one of the largest and strictest meritocracies around.
While I'm sure many people here will make jokes about Windows 95, it was quite a leap in stability and usablility from windows 3.1.
One major improvement was going from co-operative multi-tasking to pre-emptive multi-tasking. On Win 3.1 applications had to relinquish the CPU.
Personally I think Win 95 has aged better than Mick Jagger. It's a big let down from doing a commercial for Microsoft to being the background music for Ameriquest Mortgage. (Whoever thay are.)
The only thing is that it reminds you that you're getting old if you inadvertantly say 'ASA' instead of 'ISO' and have to explain what you mean :)
You know you are getting old when you think of ASA 64 as fast film!
an email from Phil Barrett (lead developer of windows 3.1):
heh, heh, heh . . . my proposal is to have bambi refuse to run this alien OS ? Comments ? The approach we take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load.
There are other examples and evidence, but this is one of the most damning.
1) It was certainly well known among developers that Microsoft's own software had access to undocumented parts of the API. This was certainly true in DOS and in Win 3.1.
2) I'm amused when I run early versions of Quick Basic on my Win XP box and get the error message which says (paraphrased) "Boo hoo, you are not running genuine MS-DOS. Do you wish to continue at your own risk since we can't gaurantee that the program will work properly, etc....."
I can't stand taxes which are for some specific purpose. A tax is a tax. All the money should go into a big pool
That's what you get when a political party supports using taxation as an instrument of social policy.
The basic idea is that "sin taxes" will be used to combat the "sin" being taxed. The underlying idea is that some elitist politician thinks he knows what's good for you.
Let me cite an example that most readers of this site can understand. Back in the 60s there was an original Star Trek episode called "A Piece of the Action". It was set on a planet which imitated Chicago during the gangster era of the 20s. [Probably that set was free at Paramount that day....] At the end of the episode, the crew makes peace between the warring gang factions, and informs them that "The Federation is taking over." and that a starship will be dispatched each your to the planet to pick up the Federation's "cut". The explanation is that this money will be put back into the planetary treasury so that people will eventually be reformed in spite of themselves.
Liberalism at it's finest!
Re: proposal to tax doctors to pay for Medicaid.
You're in Washington state? 1% of gross revenue goes to subsidize somehow, doctors who "care for the poor".
No, Michigan.
Then we can enact a 25% tax on all food sold online to fight obesity!
Our governor wants a special tax on the gross revenue of doctors to finance Medicaid.
can anyone see anything other than cost per suit preventing this being used as an aid for modern soldiers
It also helps fend off giant butt ugly aliens with acid for blood!
previously known as "Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (DHCP)."
as opposed to Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
This threw me the first time someone asked me to set up DHCP on a computer, since my first thought was of the VA's medical records system!
IBM had PL/1 with syntax worse than JOSS,
and everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
So DEC, while hoping to outdo, wrote DCL and BLISS, plus SOS and EDT - the programmers were pissed!
What was that turbo button for? IIRC, it didn't do... anything. At all. On any operating system.
It's related to a switch once found on the insides of a PDP-10 at the AI lab at MIT. This switch had two positions, "magic" and "more magic". Although there was only one wire leading to the switch, when the switch was toggled the computer crashed.... several times.
The OS/2 userbase was totally shocked upon hearing this news from IBM. He then went to the fridge and got a soda.
Actually there are a number of developers still using OS/2 and there is also a connection to Open Source - Open Watcom. Open Watcom lets you cross develop for Win32, Win16, extended DOS, DOS and OS/2 in either C/C++ or Fortran 77 (lots of 90ish extensions).
TFA was talking about clinical studies published in medical journals like JAMA and the New england Journal of Medicine.
:-)!]
At one time the NEJM was considered a "gold standard" in publishing medical research. IMO, that's no longer true. I do believe that journals are no longer as careful about what they publish. [Rhetorical question- why did Marcia Angell leave as editor of the NEJM?]
While we do expect "science" to eventually verify or refute claims made in scientific studies, I do not remember such a high percentage of studies being "overturned", as the lawyers would say. [Of course I am susceptible to "recall bias.
Along with journals more willing to print research, I do believe that the quality of research itself has worsened. [I've seen first hand some of the "fun and games" that take place in academia. That's one reason I'm no longer there!]
In addition, the public's hunger for news about health and lifestyle and the media's need for sensationalism have fueled a news feeding frenzy. I doubt that the public or the news media are really capable of judging the worth of clinical studies. I don't think the public or the media understand the medicine or science involved nor do they actually know how to evaluate research on scientific, methodological or statistical grounds.
I get really peeved when I see some study touted on TV that reports a 10% reduction in some disease supposedly caused by modifying some risk factor. Without seeing the confidence interval bouding this estimate of risk, I'm not willing to say the effect is real. As a rule of thumb, I was taught to view with skepticism any study that does not halve or double the relative risk attributed to a risk factor.
And that puts an end to software piracy. I mean look at the War on Drugs, we won that years ago.
And the war on poverty too. That was won back in the '60s!
With a modicum of thought (ie consider it is the same force accelerating both of them) you should realise that it's very plausible that the vomit will strike the coaster again somewhere near the bottom, offset slightly by whatever horizontal inertia the vomit had (which might be quite small, for many roller coasters).
;)
Calculating exactly where the vomit will hit the coaster (ignoring air friction, as always) sounds like a really interesting basic problem to give students learning Newtonian mechanics.
As would a variation on a standard ballistic trajectory problem once posed in a physics class. "A boy stands 2 feet from a toilet..."
1616 pages
The latest Harbison & Steele is only 560 pages long.
the original K&R: 228 pages
K&R 2nd ed: 272 pages (also uses thicker paper)
It is very very humbling to think about all those teams sitting around calculating the sine and log for the damned tables.
At the time, and even into the era of electro-mechanical computers and mechanical desk calculators, the main principle involved was computing formulas by means of differences. See Abramowitz & Stegun for a whole host of formulas.
Back when new math was coming into vogue, I was taught a simple method for determining the degree of a series of numbers - take differences between adjacent terms and repeat the process until the terms have a constant difference. The number of times you do this gives you the degree of the polynomial involved.
In a similar manner, very complex tables can be created just by adding up high order differences, then combining them over and over again until you generate the entries in a table.
Likewise, there are all sorts of interpolation formulas which allow you to refine the entries in the table, some of course are directly related to Taylor series expansions.
The key here is by using differences, you can reduce the strength of the calculation from multiplication and division to a series of additions and subtractions by accumulating terms. Of course you have to be very careful to keep the propagation of errors in mind!
It's sad, in a way, that a whole set of formulas, particularly in trigonometry, have been rendered obsolete by the electronic calculator. While I have not used a slide rule for 30 years and have not used trig/log tables for much longer, I think that people do miss out on a depth of understanding by not doing manual calculations. Using a slide rule gives you a feel for estimating results and keeping people from being fooled by a large number of significant digits. Likewise, I know I have a better understanding of what it took to navigate the seas with tables and instruments.
perhaps you missed the Zombie Dogs [link]
You'll need a heart-lung machine for that!
Each neuron is like a tiny, slow analog DSP, feeding back FM around a base frequency
1. Look up the original studies of visual perception and you will see that this is so. Visual perception is built upon multiple layers of neurons, each of which acts like a filter.
2. Neurons can modulate their own level of excitability. IIRC they change their reactiveness to cAMP.