You can't possibly know whether the doxycycline is clearing up the infection or whether it would have gotten better anyway without it. The point of TFA is that it would have gotten better anyway.
Your intestine has about a kilogram of symbiotic bacteria, with dozens of major species and hundreds of minor species. When you take antibiotics, you wipe out some or most of those species.
The bacteria in yogurt (usually a single species) are completely different. You can't repopulate the normal bacteria of your intestine with yogurt.
Nobody knows exactly how bacteria repopulate the bowel, but one thing you could try is a fecal transplant -- in other words, eat shit. This is not a standard medical procedure, but it's under serious investigation.
One of the problems with destroying the normal gut flora with antibiotics is that the gut is a major immunological organ. The immune system (all those white blood cells) has to decide whether a bacterial species is a normal symbiote or a pathogen, which is difficult and inaccurate. If you wipe out the normal flora and start again, your immune system might make mistakes.
Nobody knows what causes autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosis, Crohn's, inflammatory bowel disease, etc., but wiping out the normal gut flora with antibiotics is a plausible mechanism.
So using antibiotics when you don't need them, in addition to promoting antibiotic resistance, might give you one of those horrible autoimmune diseases.
I'm basing that on a story the Wall Street Journal ran a few years ago profiling an Irish singer who moved to California (I think LA) while under contract to one of the record companies.
They thought she had potential, they produced one record, then another, they sold OK but not well, they kept changing the formula, and the understanding was that if she didn't get at least a modest hit they would drop her. It was a good business story.
Unfortunately I can't cite it or look it up, so I'm recalling from memory. I could be wrong. It sounded like they were investing about $100,000 a year, including the apartment and the car.
But my original point is that the record companies do invest in singers. It's more than just recording studios and platters, it's marketing and development of new talent.
However, would we have good music anyway even without the record companies? I think so.
It wasn't just expensive studios and physical product.
They used to spend a lot of money developing new talent and marketing. They might pay an upcoming star $100,000 for a year while they wait for her to take off (if ever). Living expenses, travel, ads in Variety and Rolling Stone, and cocaine are expensive.
I'm not sure whether these were productive expenses or whether they were just the cost of positioning themselves on the top in a competitive market. *Somebody* is going to have a hit, whether it's a corporate-promoted work or not. We had music before the days of big corporations, and we'll still have music if they go.
While there is wide opposition to the bill in Canada, including every province's privacy commissioner, the federal government's privacy commissioner, and many people across party lines, with a majority in parliament the conservatives will ram this law through faster than Justice Minister Vic Toews (pronounced taze... like tazer) ramming a mistress.
This really is disappointing. I always thought of Canada as the refuge you could go to if you were running away from the draft or slavery or if the Republicans took over.
In this country, any conservative politician who was caught with a mistress like that would have to resign for at least one election cycle.
We're discussing waste disposal. As other people here have said from first-hand observation, and as many news stories have reported, when circuit boards are exported to the third world, they are disposed of in dangerous ways, particularly by burning in open fires to get the copper out, which does expose workers, children, and bystanders to the lead.
I don't know why the government should be responsible for processing electronic waste, just because they've been stuck before with cleaning up the sins of the past. It's the responsibility of those who manufacture and use the equipment.
I'm not sure that it's possible to recycle electronic equipment safely and affordably, and and I haven't seen anybody do it profitably. (I think there was a German company that developed a huge machine with whirring blades, but I don't know if they were commercially successful.)
One of the main costs of manufacture is assembling this equipment on assembly lines. Just think how much more expensive it is to disassemble them, which is custom work that can't be done the same way on assembly lines.
I don't think the Africans or Asians can be trusted to recycle circuit boards safely. We have enough problems with toxic waste in the U.S., and we have an elaborate system of regulation and enforcement (which the Republicans are doing their best to undo). I can't imagine third world recyclers doing it safely when they have essentially no enforcement.
It may be that the only safe way to dispose of electronic waste is to bury it here in landfills. Well-designed landfills keep the waste within layers of relatively impermeable clay where it should stay for a few thousand years. Or maybe the Germans can get their shredder working.
I wonder what reason they gave in the memo announcing the change.
I remember how an electrical wholesaling industry association set up their first computerized order system which they called the Direct Order Entry Processing System.
In the memo they said they changed it because it was "too hard to pronounce."
There were major diseases (not AIDS) spread because Western health workers were vaccinating people with reusable needles and not sterilizing them properly.
There are even local "healers" who use injection drugs indiscriminately, without proper sterilization, and also spread diseases, including AIDS.
They also use anti-malaria drugs, anti-tuberculosis drugs, and antibiotics used at sub-therapeutic doses and cause drug resistance, a problem that comes back to bite us.
Of course, improper use of antibiotics is a problem in the U.S. too. And it's a good thing we finally got our tattoo parlors cleaned up before it became popular. You had a pretty good chance of getting hepatitis C, cirrhosis, and liver cancer along with your tat.
I have an LCD monitor with a blown power supply sitting right here in my apartment, waiting to get $20 worth of capacitors.
I am familiar with the feeling of turning on the power switch and having a once-dead computer or something turn on again, but unless you enjoy doing it, it isn't worth the time.
Environmental lead, from paint and gasoline, was doing so much damage that it showed up in lower scores in children's IQ tests, which correlated statistically with their body lead levels. There's lots of solid science behind it.
If you knew some chemistry you'd understand why the people who do are horrified by this waste disposal.
It was the Belgians who taught them the European concept of establishing a ruling class like the Europeans did and killing each other like the Protestants and Catholics did.
Most science-fiction authors, from my experience, have a poor understanding of actual scientific knowledge and, instead, rely on omission of fact to glaze over scientific points of interest. Frankenstein, for example, never exactly explains in concrete terms exactly how the monster was brought to life, or how it survived, or what it ate, or actual and exact process undertaken to reproduce the experiment.
Actually, Frankenstein was quite scientifically sophisticated and pro-science for its day. As TFA explains, Galvani was all the rage at the time. They knew that electricity would cause a frog's legs to twitch; they just didn't know why. How could they -- they had just discovered it. Camillo Golgi hadn't been born. They had a tentative working theory that the electricity caused animism. They even thought, reasonably, that electricity might re-animate dead bodies back to life as a medical treatment. Electric shocks were a frequently-attempted treatment for drowning. When Mary's child with Percy was stillborn, they attempted to revive it with electric shocks. It wasn't so far-fetched -- in 1928, doctors succeeded http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cardiac_pacemaker#History
Dr. Victor Frankenstein was actually modeled on Shelley's informal tutor, Dr. James Lind. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279684/ In the actual novel, in contrast to the popular image, Frankenstein was a serious scientist, and the monster himself was a sympathetic intellectual rejected by society (much as Shelley was in his schooldays).
Mary Shelley understood the science of her day pretty well, and Frankenstein captured it reasonably well -- better than a lot of science fiction writers today.
It's a mistake because in those cases scientists have the goal of changing policy.
The methods of persuasion that they use don't accomplish that goal. For years, doctors were trying to create needle exchange programs, and the federal and state governments would prevent it. They kept getting better and better evidence, and it didn't make any difference. It took political activism by groups like Housing Works (who *did* understand politics) to get it.
When Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA's scientific panel on making Plan B, the morning-after pill, available over the counter without prescription, you don't think Sibelius misunderstood the evidence, do you? You don't think the Obama Administration would change their position if you just gave them more rigorous evidence and proved more strongly that it was safe, do you?
In most public policy debates, the scientific evidence is clear. The policies are being disrupted for political reasons. If you don't understand that process, you won't have any effect on the debate.
If you just make more detailed scientific arguments (which other people have already done to no effect, and which your adversaries are ignoring) you won't have any effect on the debate. You're just doing what you know how to do, not what needs to be done.
If you had a liberal arts education, you'd learn how policies get changed, and you'd know how to change policies today.
If you want a doctor who know when politicians are full of it, you need one who understands what science is, and that everything that has predictive power is subject to the scrutiny afforded to scientific theories.
This is a common mistake among scientists. Scientists get into the public debate, start talking "like scientists," about the narrow scientific issues of the matter, and they get exasperated because people ignore them. That's what happened with star wars, creationism, global warming, etc.
The more sophisticated scientists understand this. There have been many articles in Science, New Scientist, and the other major journals explaining this, and explaining what scientists have to do if they want people outside of science to take them seriously. Psychologists and political scientists have studied this process.
In particular, there have been many articles explaining what works and doesn't work when scientists want to affect the political process. Look up what Peter Agre said about it.
Of course, sometimes (especially in the U.S.) you're just outspent by a powerful lobby and there's nothing you can do about it, but sometimes you can win by organizing.
There's more to this than I can explain on Slashdot. You could make an entire college class about it -- which is what they call political science.
It's called a liberal education. The scientists in Europe understood this, and so did the American scientists they taught. That's why, when you read scientific memoirs (and even papers), you'll see references to James Joyce, Goethe, the Bahavad-Gita, and the sculptures of Henry Moore. That's why so many Nobel laureates in science got their undergraduate degrees as literature majors.
I want to go to a doctor who studied a year of molecular biology as an undergraduate. I don't want him to get his education on the job from the drug company salesman.
I believe in a liberal education. I also want a doctor who took a few courses in English, poly sci, economics, history, etc. I want a doctor who can write a coherent sentence and read a well-organized article. I want a doctor who knows when the American Medical Association is trying to put one over on them. I want doctors who know when their politicians are trying to put one over on them.
Right now the Obama administration is making promises and assumptions about the value of health care IT that are (sometimes) patent nonsense. I want doctors to know enough about IT to understand that.
There's always the question in medical education of, "How much is enough." I'd rather err on the side of too much. Especially when that doctor is applying a sharp object to my testes.
There were some polls at Occupy Wall Street. Most of them voted for Obama. They're now split 50/50 for and against Obama.
There were references in the Wikipedia article on Occupy Wall Street and in a New York Magazine article.
The main reason for their disenchantment with Obama was that he brought into the White House all the Wall Street people who were responsible for the crash, like Larry Summers, and Obama's policies have been to support Wall Street. I don't understand finance that well, but the best articles I've seen about that were by Matt Taibi, who writes for Rolling Stone. His interview with Bill Moyers was very good.
Another reason for disenchantment with Obama is health care; that he promised single payer and gave us subsidized private insurance (which costs about twice as much). The Obama health plan is actually modeled on a Heritage Foundation plan. Rahm Emanuel called the progressives who wanted the public option "fucking retarded".
The Republicans are doing their part to help get Obama re-elected by offering candidates who are raving lunatics. If I didn't know better I'd think they were working together.
My hobby: Finding old cold-war denunciations of Communist tyrranny that our current American leaders now think is a pretty good idea:
By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union. -- Ronald Reagan
I hope this indicates that Reporters Without Borders is moving towards some independence and partisan neutrality, unlike their past performance.
You can either take money from Otto Reich, or you can be an impartial, credible advocate of press freedom. You can't do both.
Reporters Without Borders has chosen to take money from Otto Reich.
As this Wikipedia article explains, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders#Controversies Reich was engaging in propaganda to support military campaigns against left-wing governments governments in Latin America, and he was on the board of the School of the Americas, which trained people in torture and executions.
They accused the Aristide government in Haiti of attacks on the opposition press, but they ignored attacks on journalists under the Latortue government.
That's right. When I learn a new program, I don't know what command I'm looking for. I haven't yet memorized all the commands, and I want to look at all the menu commands to find the one I vaguely remember. Or to find the one I didn't know about. Most computer users are like that.
After I've learned the commands, I use the keyboard shortcuts. I don't use the menus much, but they're there when I need them.
What's the alternative? Am I supposed to read the manual and put post-it notes on my monitor? Do I watch an instructional video?
Slashdot Mirror
You can't possibly know whether the doxycycline is clearing up the infection or whether it would have gotten better anyway without it. The point of TFA is that it would have gotten better anyway.
Your intestine has about a kilogram of symbiotic bacteria, with dozens of major species and hundreds of minor species. When you take antibiotics, you wipe out some or most of those species.
The bacteria in yogurt (usually a single species) are completely different. You can't repopulate the normal bacteria of your intestine with yogurt.
Nobody knows exactly how bacteria repopulate the bowel, but one thing you could try is a fecal transplant -- in other words, eat shit. This is not a standard medical procedure, but it's under serious investigation.
One of the problems with destroying the normal gut flora with antibiotics is that the gut is a major immunological organ. The immune system (all those white blood cells) has to decide whether a bacterial species is a normal symbiote or a pathogen, which is difficult and inaccurate. If you wipe out the normal flora and start again, your immune system might make mistakes.
Nobody knows what causes autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosis, Crohn's, inflammatory bowel disease, etc., but wiping out the normal gut flora with antibiotics is a plausible mechanism.
So using antibiotics when you don't need them, in addition to promoting antibiotic resistance, might give you one of those horrible autoimmune diseases.
I'm basing that on a story the Wall Street Journal ran a few years ago profiling an Irish singer who moved to California (I think LA) while under contract to one of the record companies.
They thought she had potential, they produced one record, then another, they sold OK but not well, they kept changing the formula, and the understanding was that if she didn't get at least a modest hit they would drop her. It was a good business story.
Unfortunately I can't cite it or look it up, so I'm recalling from memory. I could be wrong. It sounded like they were investing about $100,000 a year, including the apartment and the car.
But my original point is that the record companies do invest in singers. It's more than just recording studios and platters, it's marketing and development of new talent.
However, would we have good music anyway even without the record companies? I think so.
Apparently there really is a country like that. Monty Python didn't make it up.
It wasn't just expensive studios and physical product.
They used to spend a lot of money developing new talent and marketing. They might pay an upcoming star $100,000 for a year while they wait for her to take off (if ever). Living expenses, travel, ads in Variety and Rolling Stone, and cocaine are expensive.
I'm not sure whether these were productive expenses or whether they were just the cost of positioning themselves on the top in a competitive market. *Somebody* is going to have a hit, whether it's a corporate-promoted work or not. We had music before the days of big corporations, and we'll still have music if they go.
Well, there is his mistress. http://pushedleft.blogspot.com/2010/07/oh-oh-vic-toews-caught-cheating-again.html
While there is wide opposition to the bill in Canada, including every province's privacy commissioner, the federal government's privacy commissioner, and many people across party lines, with a majority in parliament the conservatives will ram this law through faster than Justice Minister Vic Toews (pronounced taze... like tazer) ramming a mistress.
This really is disappointing. I always thought of Canada as the refuge you could go to if you were running away from the draft or slavery or if the Republicans took over.
In this country, any conservative politician who was caught with a mistress like that would have to resign for at least one election cycle.
Any videos?
We're discussing waste disposal. As other people here have said from first-hand observation, and as many news stories have reported, when circuit boards are exported to the third world, they are disposed of in dangerous ways, particularly by burning in open fires to get the copper out, which does expose workers, children, and bystanders to the lead.
I don't know why the government should be responsible for processing electronic waste, just because they've been stuck before with cleaning up the sins of the past. It's the responsibility of those who manufacture and use the equipment.
I'm not sure that it's possible to recycle electronic equipment safely and affordably, and and I haven't seen anybody do it profitably. (I think there was a German company that developed a huge machine with whirring blades, but I don't know if they were commercially successful.)
One of the main costs of manufacture is assembling this equipment on assembly lines. Just think how much more expensive it is to disassemble them, which is custom work that can't be done the same way on assembly lines.
I don't think the Africans or Asians can be trusted to recycle circuit boards safely. We have enough problems with toxic waste in the U.S., and we have an elaborate system of regulation and enforcement (which the Republicans are doing their best to undo). I can't imagine third world recyclers doing it safely when they have essentially no enforcement.
It may be that the only safe way to dispose of electronic waste is to bury it here in landfills. Well-designed landfills keep the waste within layers of relatively impermeable clay where it should stay for a few thousand years. Or maybe the Germans can get their shredder working.
I wonder what reason they gave in the memo announcing the change.
I remember how an electrical wholesaling industry association set up their first computerized order system which they called the Direct Order Entry Processing System.
In the memo they said they changed it because it was "too hard to pronounce."
There was some trouble with that.
There were major diseases (not AIDS) spread because Western health workers were vaccinating people with reusable needles and not sterilizing them properly.
There are even local "healers" who use injection drugs indiscriminately, without proper sterilization, and also spread diseases, including AIDS.
They also use anti-malaria drugs, anti-tuberculosis drugs, and antibiotics used at sub-therapeutic doses and cause drug resistance, a problem that comes back to bite us.
Of course, improper use of antibiotics is a problem in the U.S. too. And it's a good thing we finally got our tattoo parlors cleaned up before it became popular. You had a pretty good chance of getting hepatitis C, cirrhosis, and liver cancer along with your tat.
I have an LCD monitor with a blown power supply sitting right here in my apartment, waiting to get $20 worth of capacitors.
I am familiar with the feeling of turning on the power switch and having a once-dead computer or something turn on again, but unless you enjoy doing it, it isn't worth the time.
That's right. I don't see curbside PCs the way I used to.
Lots of analog CRT TVs, though. Anybody want one?
Environmental lead, from paint and gasoline, was doing so much damage that it showed up in lower scores in children's IQ tests, which correlated statistically with their body lead levels. There's lots of solid science behind it.
If you knew some chemistry you'd understand why the people who do are horrified by this waste disposal.
They weren't killing each other.
It was the Belgians who taught them the European concept of establishing a ruling class like the Europeans did and killing each other like the Protestants and Catholics did.
Most science-fiction authors, from my experience, have a poor understanding of actual scientific knowledge and, instead, rely on omission of fact to glaze over scientific points of interest. Frankenstein, for example, never exactly explains in concrete terms exactly how the monster was brought to life, or how it survived, or what it ate, or actual and exact process undertaken to reproduce the experiment.
Actually, Frankenstein was quite scientifically sophisticated and pro-science for its day. As TFA explains, Galvani was all the rage at the time. They knew that electricity would cause a frog's legs to twitch; they just didn't know why. How could they -- they had just discovered it. Camillo Golgi hadn't been born. They had a tentative working theory that the electricity caused animism. They even thought, reasonably, that electricity might re-animate dead bodies back to life as a medical treatment. Electric shocks were a frequently-attempted treatment for drowning. When Mary's child with Percy was stillborn, they attempted to revive it with electric shocks. It wasn't so far-fetched -- in 1928, doctors succeeded http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cardiac_pacemaker#History
Dr. Victor Frankenstein was actually modeled on Shelley's informal tutor, Dr. James Lind. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279684/ In the actual novel, in contrast to the popular image, Frankenstein was a serious scientist, and the monster himself was a sympathetic intellectual rejected by society (much as Shelley was in his schooldays).
Mary Shelley understood the science of her day pretty well, and Frankenstein captured it reasonably well -- better than a lot of science fiction writers today.
It's a mistake because in those cases scientists have the goal of changing policy.
The methods of persuasion that they use don't accomplish that goal. For years, doctors were trying to create needle exchange programs, and the federal and state governments would prevent it.
They kept getting better and better evidence, and it didn't make any difference. It took political activism by groups like Housing Works (who *did* understand politics) to get it.
When Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA's scientific panel on making Plan B, the morning-after pill, available over the counter without prescription, you don't think Sibelius misunderstood the evidence, do you? You don't think the Obama Administration would change their position if you just gave them more rigorous evidence and proved more strongly that it was safe, do you?
In most public policy debates, the scientific evidence is clear. The policies are being disrupted for political reasons. If you don't understand that process, you won't have any effect on the debate.
If you just make more detailed scientific arguments (which other people have already done to no effect, and which your adversaries are ignoring) you won't have any effect on the debate. You're just doing what you know how to do, not what needs to be done.
If you had a liberal arts education, you'd learn how policies get changed, and you'd know how to change policies today.
If you want a doctor who know when politicians are full of it, you need one who understands what science is, and that everything that has predictive power is subject to the scrutiny afforded to scientific theories.
This is a common mistake among scientists. Scientists get into the public debate, start talking "like scientists," about the narrow scientific issues of the matter, and they get exasperated because people ignore them. That's what happened with star wars, creationism, global warming, etc.
The more sophisticated scientists understand this. There have been many articles in Science, New Scientist, and the other major journals explaining this, and explaining what scientists have to do if they want people outside of science to take them seriously. Psychologists and political scientists have studied this process.
In particular, there have been many articles explaining what works and doesn't work when scientists want to affect the political process. Look up what Peter Agre said about it.
Of course, sometimes (especially in the U.S.) you're just outspent by a powerful lobby and there's nothing you can do about it, but sometimes you can win by organizing.
There's more to this than I can explain on Slashdot. You could make an entire college class about it -- which is what they call political science.
It's called a liberal education. The scientists in Europe understood this, and so did the American scientists they taught. That's why, when you read scientific memoirs (and even papers), you'll see references to James Joyce, Goethe, the Bahavad-Gita, and the sculptures of Henry Moore. That's why so many Nobel laureates in science got their undergraduate degrees as literature majors.
I want to go to a doctor who studied a year of molecular biology as an undergraduate. I don't want him to get his education on the job from the drug company salesman.
I believe in a liberal education. I also want a doctor who took a few courses in English, poly sci, economics, history, etc. I want a doctor who can write a coherent sentence and read a well-organized article. I want a doctor who knows when the American Medical Association is trying to put one over on them. I want doctors who know when their politicians are trying to put one over on them.
Right now the Obama administration is making promises and assumptions about the value of health care IT that are (sometimes) patent nonsense. I want doctors to know enough about IT to understand that.
There's always the question in medical education of, "How much is enough." I'd rather err on the side of too much. Especially when that doctor is applying a sharp object to my testes.
Yeah. That's so wrong you don't even have to give facts to back up your assertion.
There were some polls at Occupy Wall Street. Most of them voted for Obama. They're now split 50/50 for and against Obama.
There were references in the Wikipedia article on Occupy Wall Street and in a New York Magazine article.
The main reason for their disenchantment with Obama was that he brought into the White House all the Wall Street people who were responsible for the crash, like Larry Summers, and Obama's policies have been to support Wall Street. I don't understand finance that well, but the best articles I've seen about that were by Matt Taibi, who writes for Rolling Stone. His interview with Bill Moyers was very good.
Another reason for disenchantment with Obama is health care; that he promised single payer and gave us subsidized private insurance (which costs about twice as much). The Obama health plan is actually modeled on a Heritage Foundation plan. Rahm Emanuel called the progressives who wanted the public option "fucking retarded".
The Republicans are doing their part to help get Obama re-elected by offering candidates who are raving lunatics. If I didn't know better I'd think they were working together.
My hobby: Finding old cold-war denunciations of Communist tyrranny that our current American leaders now think is a pretty good idea:
By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union. -- Ronald Reagan
I hope this indicates that Reporters Without Borders is moving towards some independence and partisan neutrality, unlike their past performance.
You can either take money from Otto Reich, or you can be an impartial, credible advocate of press freedom. You can't do both.
Reporters Without Borders has chosen to take money from Otto Reich.
As this Wikipedia article explains, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders#Controversies Reich was engaging in propaganda to support military campaigns against left-wing governments governments in Latin America, and he was on the board of the School of the Americas, which trained people in torture and executions.
They accused the Aristide government in Haiti of attacks on the opposition press, but they ignored attacks on journalists under the Latortue government.
That's right. When I learn a new program, I don't know what command I'm looking for. I haven't yet memorized all the commands, and I want to look at all the menu commands to find the one I vaguely remember. Or to find the one I didn't know about. Most computer users are like that.
After I've learned the commands, I use the keyboard shortcuts. I don't use the menus much, but they're there when I need them.
What's the alternative? Am I supposed to read the manual and put post-it notes on my monitor? Do I watch an instructional video?
He supports some good policies, but I could never vote for him because he is a right-wing nut job.
"March for Life." Really. What would Ayn Rand do?
We'll greet you with flowers!