Re:Old news -- reprofusion injury (really old news
on
Treating the Dead
·
· Score: 1
So maybe the reprofusion stress is what causes that tingly pain that happens when you restore circulation to a leg or whatever that has fallen asleep and gotten numb. Actually (as I understand it) that's the result of the circulation being cut off to the nerves, and then being restored, but yeah, there is a similarity, good thinking.
Old news -- reprofusion injury (really old news)
on
Treating the Dead
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I wrote about that >20 years ago, when I was writing for a biotechnology newsletter. After >20 years of research, they understand it much better today.
Every surgeon knows about reprofusion injury. You can go to Barnes & Noble and look it up in a surgery textbook.
I don't understand why Newsweek says it's new or that it wasn't known in 1993. I assume those doctors came up with some new detail in its treatment.
The "conflict of interest" doesn't bother me, but the lack of a link to or citation of a published study does. Does anyone know where the real details about this study are available?
They're not. That's the problem, he's talking to a newspaper without having published anything. AFA I can tell from the article, he hasn't even presented his results as an abstract or a talk at a meeting. And the Globe & Mail is usually pretty good on reporting medicine, but this story doesn't even mention whether it's a prospective, randomized controlled study or a retrospective, backwards-looking study. (And it doesn't get a reacton from another scientist who knows the research.) Apparently it's a retrospective study, which has problems. Retrospective studies found that women who took hormone replacement therapy had fewer heart attacks. But prospective studies found out the truth, which is that they had more heart attacks. The probable reason: Women who have generally healthier habits, like exercise, diet, and no smoking, are also more likely to take (useless and dangerous) hormone replacement therapy, and vitamins.
Here's Veith's earlier work, which was a retrospective study, and toned down by a responsible journal editor. As far as I could tell from a Google search, he hasn't done any prospective studies.
Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2007 Mar;16(3):422-9.
Vitamin D and Reduced Risk of Breast Cancer: A Population-Based Case-Control Study
Julia A. Knight1, Maia Lesosky1, Heidi Barnett1, Janet M. Raboud1 and Reinhold Vieth2
1 Prosserman Centre for Health Research, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute and 2 Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada
Requests for reprints: Julia A. Knight, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, 60 Murray Street, Box 18, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 3L9. Phone: 416-586-8701; Fax: 416-586-8404. E-mail: knight@mshri.on.ca
Background: Vitamin D, antiproliferative and proapoptotic in breast cancer cell lines, can reduce the development of mammary tumors in carcinogen-exposed rats. Current evidence in humans is limited with some suggestion that vitamin D-related factors may reduce the risk of breast cancer. We conducted a population-based case-control study to assess the evidence for a relationship between sources of vitamin D and breast cancer risk.
Methods: Women with newly diagnosed invasive breast cancer were identified from the Ontario Cancer Registry. Women without breast cancer were identified through randomly selected residential telephone numbers. Telephone interviews were completed for 972 cases and 1,135 controls. Odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for vitamin D-related variables were estimated using unconditional logistic regression with adjustment for potential confounders.
Results: Reduced breast cancer risks were associated with increasing sun exposure from ages 10 to 19 (e.g., OR, 0.65; 95% CI, 0.50-0.85 for the highest quartile of outdoor activities versus the lowest; P for trend = 0.0006). Reduced risk was also associated with cod liver oil use (OR, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.62-0.92) and increasing milk consumption (OR, 0.62 95% CI 0.45-0.86 for ?10 glasses per week versus none; P for trend = 0.0004). There was weaker evidence for associations from ages 20 to 29 and no evidence for ages 45 to 54.
Conclusion: We found strong evidence to support the hypothesis that vitamin D could help prevent breast cancer. However, our results suggest that exposure earlier in life, particularly during breast development, maybe most relevant. These results should be confirmed. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007;16(3):422-9)
Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we? Oh - is it ready? OK, here we go:
As much as I appreciate the work Mr. Mooney does, what precisely makes him credible to speak about science related topics? He has a B.A. in English, and I doubt very much that he has a fundamental grasp of the concepts he speaks of... Anyone care to share their thoughts on the subject? That's a fair question that deserves a reasonable answer.
I read Mooney's book, and I read several of his articles. It was consistent with what I had been reading in Science, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Henry Waxman's documentation (which is where a lot of this comes from).
More convincing than their arguments is the Bush Administration's inability to give a convincing rebuttal. I also read the Wall Street Journal editorial page every day to get the other side, and I don't think they gave a coherent answer. Most significantly, when they got someone to rebut the scientists, they usually got an economist, not a scientist, and their economists seemed to make obvious logical and scientific fallicies. For that matter, the Wall Street Journal news stories pretty much took Mooney's perspective. (Science and New Scientist made a reasonable effort to give the opposing views too, and at least they got scientists.)
There was an editorial in Science signed by science advisors to presidents over 30 years denouncing the Bush Administration -- including many Republicans. Even Republican scientists said that they've never seen political pressure like this (and I saw political pressure on scientists under the Carter and Clinton Administration). The unanimity among scientists really is striking, bipartisan and unprecedented. It's always possible that they could all be wrong, but it's better than the evidence we usually have for other policy decisions (like Star Wars), and given the risks, you can't just say, "Let's put off action for 10 years while we get more evidence," like George W. Bush does.
So as a journalist, much of what Mooney does is merely summing up what highly-credentialed PhD-level scientists are saying, giving the arguments on both sides, coming to conclusions, and giving it a context. The scientists say that he's reporting their views accurately. Furthermore much of what he does is reporting on politics, and it's nice, but not necessary, to be a scientist to do that. (Gerard Piel, the publisher of Scientific American, was a history major.)
Lots of people do that, and still turn out to be wrong. But Mooney got generally good reviews in the scientific journals. He took a lot of stuff I read and made it easier for me to understand the context. In my reading, he does seem to have a good grasp of the subject.
He wouldn't be qualified to do the hard science, like look at temperature data in ice cores and make a scientific judgment about it, but he doesn't make hard scientific decisions, he just talks to other people who do.
That's what qualifies him to write a book and report on this. He could be wrong, but he's at least as qualified as any journalist, columnist, or economist. Of course you have a perfect right to be skeptical, and you provide a useful service when you are skeptical. But I think there are good answers to your objections.
I don't suppose anyone would argue that the President of the United States has a fundamental grasp of these concepts.:)
You're lucky, I'm an obsessive note-taker. You'll have to supply your own verbs, though.
Talk, How to protect your open source projects from poisonous people, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian W. Fitzpatrick, January 25, 2007, Subversion developers from Google explain their experiences. Google TechTalks. http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=-4216011961 522818645
Open Source Developers Speakers Series, 4. Google engineers, Chicago.
"Abstract: Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful. These people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. Come learn how to identify these people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail your project. Told through a series of (often amusing) real life anecdotes and experiences."
Most important resource is the attention and focus of your community. Poisonous people can show up, distract your developers, cause emotional drain.
On purpose or accident. More often unintentionally.
Perfectionism. Design document went on forever.
Painting the bike shed. Enginers hand in huge document for design of the nuclear power plant, approved in 5 minutes. Week later, come in with blueprint of bike shed they want to build, debate for months on what color.
"Call bikeshed."
People want to put their stamp.
Habits that make healthy open source community: Politeness, Respect, Trust, Humility.
Pick a direction and limit it. Subversion mission statement, "To create a competing replacement for CVS." Could point to it when people wanted to expand it. That's not in the mission statement.
Google Web Toolkit. Ajax development environment in Java.
Mailing list, primary communication. Read archives first. If they don't, they're disrespecting everybody's time.
One vehement dissenter, half the messages from one person. Call people out on it, filibustering. Consensus-based community, consensus derailed.
Document history, including mistakes. Standard format, consistent log messages. Dealt with client in old job, guy said, I can't get my programmers to write in a standard format. Responded, I've got 30 volunteers off the Internet, they follow detailed format, and you're telling me you can't get your paid employees to folow a standard format?
Commit email.
No Powerpoints. Some people go off and write big Powerpoints, come back with big document later, nobody can go through it. We have to see what you're doing as you go along.
Bus factor. How many people would have to be hit by a bus for you to wind up in a pile of shit. Project that depended on one guy, assign him a collaborator, share expertise.
Egalitarianism, not owning, no names. Good coder insisted on name, blackmail, you can't use it if I don't get my name, refused his contribution. Not willing to sacrifice our community for your ego.
Expand community. Culture perpetuates.
Founder can be booted, too possessive of his code, voted him off.
Voting is a last resort. It shows consensus didn't work.
Identify people. Put them on Bozo list.
Good cop, bad cop. Guy can turn out to be good, make valuable contributions.
Can identify them early on. Usually have a nick like CRAZYJOE, lots of different nicks, lots of caps, exclamation points.
Can't pick up on mood, ask questions they could look up, which disrespects other peoples' time.
Pump and dump violates the securities laws, right? The SEC's own web site calls them "fraudulent".
So why can't they track these guys down and prosecute them? The SEC has a pretty good investigative force. They tracked down Martha Stewart. They subpoenaed her phone records and everything.
You have to buy these stocks from a broker, so that leaves a paper trail. They have to report stock purchases to the IRS, if nothing else. You can't buy stocks with stacks of currency, can you?
The guys who are behind the pump and dump schemes by definition will buy the stock at the beginning, send out 10 million spam to get the suckers buying, dump the stock when the price goes up, and leave the suckers holding the bag.
So why can't the SEC track these guys down through the brokers, and prosecute them for this pattern of buy and sell that is obviously fraudulent?
Will somebody who understands this better than me explain to me why the SEC can't enforce the law?
That's just the web site of PubMed, which is the index to the entire peer-reviewed medical literature.
That's like saying, "If you go to the library, you'll find lots of books that prove my point." Without mentioning which books they are.
(If you do want to look something up on Pubmed, Lancet, the journal that started the whole thing, now says that mercury-containing vaccines are harmless and save lots of lives.)
Your post makes a lot of sense. I've been explaining that to my friends all week. Humans are not big mice. And those mice didn't have real (mouse) cancers. Those Canadians did great work and I hope they get a grant, but it's pretty early research.
Over the last 20 years, I can count on my fingers the cures for cancer that didn't pan out: Interferon, monoclonal antibodies (radioactive and regular), angiogenesis inhibitors....
MABs and TK inhibitors seem to be working well but it's mostly a few months to a few years longer survival (at $30,000 a month for some of them).
There are a few rare cancers that have been "cured" in the last 20 years, in the sense that they don't come back, such as childhood leukemia (although the treatment causes *other* cancers) and testicular cancer.
It's almost impossible to get all the cancer cells, and the ones that are left over are subject to Darwinian selection for drug resistance. I'm sure it can be done, but not by confusing a lottery ticket with a winner.
I've talked to librarians and information scientists, and they talk about "controlled vocabulary". They told me one of the best systems was Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi which is an index of essentially every article published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Every article is "tagged" with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) keywords, and you can search the database for those keywords. If they can use "heart" or "cardiac", they have to decide which one to use (they use "cardiac"). They have keywords to separate human studies from animal studies. Here's more explanation http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html It's basically open source.
A similar system in law is the Westlaw key word system. The New York Times used to have a great keyword index, but I can't find it in the NYT online.
If your wife is a doctor or nurse, there's a good chance that she will get a false positive. Hospitals are promoting alcohol-based hand sanitizers, because they reduce the spread of infection. But these sanitizers also cause false-positives in alcohol tests, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal recently. (Even the guy who developed the test said the way they were using it was wrong.) So doctors and nurses are getting their licenses revoked based on what everybody agrees are false positives.
What other alcohol-related products do you carry in your car? My old chemistry professor used to clean the ice off his windshield with methyl alcohol. Listerine is 27% alcohol.
If you have 100 million people in the U.S. driving a car, and you have a system with a false positive rate of 1 in 10,000, then how many false positives are you going to get?
I'm disappointed that yours was the only post on the list to make this point.
I'm disappointed that a reasonably intelligent group of people on this list, most of whom have taken a few science courses, don't understand the difference between a molecular model, an in vitro study, an in vivo study, and [skipping several steps] a human trial.
I read the New England Journal of Medicine every week, and they have a more promising development than this every month. I read Science every week, and they have 10 equally promising developments every week. And sometimes I go to a meeting like ASCO and they have 10,000 developments as promising as this. I wish more of them would turn out to be useful drugs. But we're lucky to get one significantly useful new cancer drug every year.
And when you get all done, and look at the survival curves, most of them will extend survival for 1, 2, 3 months. A drug that extends survival in colon cancer for 6 months is a big deal, and some of them cost $30,000 to $60,000 a month.
There are a few fortunate exceptions. I know somebody who's alive today because she's taking imatinib http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib But it's annoying to see every minor step hyped into a cancer cure. Ignorance is annoying.
Fair is fair. If you do a Google search on "Texas Christian University" you'll see that they have a biology department that spoke up for teaching darwinian evolution, in a state where it's not always safe to do that.
Plus, John Horner teaches in the biology department.
Plus, they have lots of nice chicks in the nursing school.
That guy was so stupid, I feel sorry for him, out of atheist charity.
This report -- from 2005 -- doesn't have anything that you couldn't have already read on Slashdot or the newspapers.
The BBC didn't check McAfee's claims with another source. The McAfee report doesn't say anything about criminals paying tuition for students to study computer science. The McAfee security analyst didn't give any details. The BBC didn't ask him the obvious question, "How do you know?" Did he talk to a student like this? Did he find it in court records? Or did he hear it from another security expert after a few drinks?
As a traditional journalist on paper and now on the Internet, I would say that you're a journalist if you have readers.
I started an informal email newsletter, and whenever I had to establish my bona fides, I would say, "I have 600 readers in your field." That got me into press conferences and got people to spend time with me for interviews.
It's a lot more impressive to have a million readers or listeners, but at the time of the American revolution, there were a lot of newspapers with 600 readers. I used to write for business newsletters with a readership of 600 industry executives.
But if you talk about rights of freedom of expression, I think that anybody who writes anything has the same rights that I do. That's true in the U.S. under the Constitution. If you write a letter to a friend denouncing the President, you still have those rights under the Constitution. If you write rants that you hang up on trees and nobody reads, you still have those rights under the Constitution.
A big newspaper like the New York Times has a big legal department to fight libel suits and subpoenas. They also have a publisher and board members with connections to politically influential people. They have the power to enforce those rights. They also get special favors, like admission to White House press conferences. But those are privileges (perhaps unfair) that go beyond rights. Those are the perks you get with a $1 billion a year business.
There's a pretty well-established concept in economics called the "Paradox of choice."
In one experiment, as I recall they set up a display of different flavors of jam in a supermarket.
First they set up a display of 6 types of jam. They sold a certain number.
Then they set up a display with 24 types of jam. They sold far fewer. People were confused so they skipped it.
More choices might seem better, but it's not better if the greater choice is more difficult to make than the smaller choice.
Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate economist, said that it's inefficient to make the very best decision, because the effort of making the perfect decision is greater than the resources gained by the decision. It's better to make a reasonably good decision.
A reasonably good decision is made by considering a few choices, not an infinite nubmer of choices. qed.
You're making a good point which is well known to people who do the statistics for medical tests.
If you have a witness look through a database of people who were arrested for a similar crime in the same neighborhood -- say, 1,000 people -- then the chances of a false match are *relatively* low, because you've only got 1,000 people to choose from.
But if the witness looks through a database of all drivers license holders in the entire state -- say, 10 million people -- then the chances of a false match are almost certain. If 1 person in a thousand looks like me, which is realistic, you'll get 10,000 matches. It depends on how close a match you require, but eyewitness identification is not too close to start with.
Then all the cops have to do is go through the list of 10,000 suspects and find the first one who doesn't have a good alibi and can't afford a good lawyer.
The state department of motor vehicles license photo database raises an interesting opportunity.
If I were a defense lawyer, and my client were being charged on the basis of eyewitness testimony, I'd go to the license database and pull out the 12 drivers who most resembled my client. Then I'd line the photos up and ask the witness to pick out my client. Unless my client's face was very unusual, the witness wouldn't be able to do it.
(The Innocence Project at Cardoza College used DNA testing to find people who were convicted of crimes but were really innocent. They said that the most common reason for false convictions was mistaken eyewitness identification. Scientific studies show the limitations to eyewitness testimony, but defense lawyers can't use that in court.)
Years ago, Scientific American had a story about a prototype system for facial recognition created of students at Brooklyn College. They had a database of about 1,000 faces, and they showed the 2 most similar and the 2 most different. The 2 most different were very different. The 2 most similar were so similar, I couldn't tell them apart. So back-of-the-envelope, I'd say about 2 faces in 1,000 will be so similar you can't tell them apart.
(Surely on Slashdot somebody must know the current research.)
So if there are 300 million people in the U.S., and you have a common-looking face, you'll have a close match to 300,000 people. Or 8,000 people in New York City.
(In New York a popular Catholic priest was arrested, based on a victim's identification, and charged with rape. His parisioners couln't believe it. Finally the cops found another guy, and charged him with the rape. Finally, they found a *third* guy, and he seemed to be the one. The newspapers published the 3 pictures. They really looked alike. Funny thing was, they were different racial types, too. One guy was hispanic, another guy was Italian.)
You mean Scandanavian socialism is so attractive that it draws people from all over the world?
And people who grow up in Scandanavian socialism have such a strong work ethic that, even though they would get paid almost as much from the welfare system, they work anyway?
You want games? I heard Linus Torvalds interviewed by Terry Gross: "I was very lucky. When I was in the university, I didn't have to pay tuition, and I had a stipend for my living expenses. I could spend all day writing computer games." (Quoting from memory.) He wanted a faster OS, and that's how he started to develop Linux.
Let's take real Communism. I once met Loren Graham, the MIT professor who was America's top expert on Soviet science, and the only one who understood the Soviets in their own terms. He gave a lecture in which he detailed all the failings of Soviet science.
I asked him what the Soviets did *well*. He told me, "their education system." Under Communism, literacy is 100% (everywhere in the world). But beyond that their technical education was among the best in the world. They educated not just an elite, but millions of scientists and engineers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_in_the_Sovie t_Union (How many immigrant computer programmers and engineers do you know in your own country who were trained in the USSR?) Don't forget, they put the first man in space.
Of course the Soviet Union was a frequently-brutal dictatorship -- until Gorbachev. They didn't have the freedom that white people had in the United States.
Today, Russia is a good model of what America would be like if the Republican free-market conservatives took over: a government that can't collect taxes, run by oligarchs and dictators, where you can't get education or even health care if you can't pay for it.
And if you destroy the government, so your rich friends don't have to pay taxes (as Republican ideologues like Grover Norquist want to do), you have no money for basic research. According to Science magazine, the well-funded Soviet scientific research enterprise is gone. Their scientists are driving cabs and opening restaurants, not creating computer games.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, reprofusion injury http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reperfusion_injury.
I wrote about that >20 years ago, when I was writing for a biotechnology newsletter. After >20 years of research, they understand it much better today.
Every surgeon knows about reprofusion injury. You can go to Barnes & Noble and look it up in a surgery textbook.
I don't understand why Newsweek says it's new or that it wasn't known in 1993. I assume those doctors came up with some new detail in its treatment.
They're not. That's the problem, he's talking to a newspaper without having published anything. AFA I can tell from the article, he hasn't even presented his results as an abstract or a talk at a meeting. And the Globe & Mail is usually pretty good on reporting medicine, but this story doesn't even mention whether it's a prospective, randomized controlled study or a retrospective, backwards-looking study. (And it doesn't get a reacton from another scientist who knows the research.) Apparently it's a retrospective study, which has problems. Retrospective studies found that women who took hormone replacement therapy had fewer heart attacks. But prospective studies found out the truth, which is that they had more heart attacks. The probable reason: Women who have generally healthier habits, like exercise, diet, and no smoking, are also more likely to take (useless and dangerous) hormone replacement therapy, and vitamins.
Here's Veith's earlier work, which was a retrospective study, and toned down by a responsible journal editor. As far as I could tell from a Google search, he hasn't done any prospective studies.
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/ 16/3/422
Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2007 Mar;16(3):422-9.
Vitamin D and Reduced Risk of Breast Cancer: A Population-Based Case-Control Study Julia A. Knight1, Maia Lesosky1, Heidi Barnett1, Janet M. Raboud1 and Reinhold Vieth2
1 Prosserman Centre for Health Research, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute and 2 Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada
Requests for reprints: Julia A. Knight, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, 60 Murray Street, Box 18, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 3L9. Phone: 416-586-8701; Fax: 416-586-8404. E-mail: knight@mshri.on.ca
Background: Vitamin D, antiproliferative and proapoptotic in breast cancer cell lines, can reduce the development of mammary tumors in carcinogen-exposed rats. Current evidence in humans is limited with some suggestion that vitamin D-related factors may reduce the risk of breast cancer. We conducted a population-based case-control study to assess the evidence for a relationship between sources of vitamin D and breast cancer risk.
Methods: Women with newly diagnosed invasive breast cancer were identified from the Ontario Cancer Registry. Women without breast cancer were identified through randomly selected residential telephone numbers. Telephone interviews were completed for 972 cases and 1,135 controls. Odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for vitamin D-related variables were estimated using unconditional logistic regression with adjustment for potential confounders.
Results: Reduced breast cancer risks were associated with increasing sun exposure from ages 10 to 19 (e.g., OR, 0.65; 95% CI, 0.50-0.85 for the highest quartile of outdoor activities versus the lowest; P for trend = 0.0006). Reduced risk was also associated with cod liver oil use (OR, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.62-0.92) and increasing milk consumption (OR, 0.62 95% CI 0.45-0.86 for ?10 glasses per week versus none; P for trend = 0.0004). There was weaker evidence for associations from ages 20 to 29 and no evidence for ages 45 to 54.
Conclusion: We found strong evidence to support the hypothesis that vitamin D could help prevent breast cancer. However, our results suggest that exposure earlier in life, particularly during breast development, maybe most relevant. These results should be confirmed. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007;16(3):422-9)
http://amasci.com/miscon/miscon.html
And this?
http://www.science-house.org/middleschool/whatsnew /
And now please welcome President Abraham Lincoln.
Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we? Oh - is it ready? OK, here we go:
Click here to start
http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
I read Mooney's book, and I read several of his articles. It was consistent with what I had been reading in Science, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Henry Waxman's documentation (which is where a lot of this comes from).
More convincing than their arguments is the Bush Administration's inability to give a convincing rebuttal. I also read the Wall Street Journal editorial page every day to get the other side, and I don't think they gave a coherent answer. Most significantly, when they got someone to rebut the scientists, they usually got an economist, not a scientist, and their economists seemed to make obvious logical and scientific fallicies. For that matter, the Wall Street Journal news stories pretty much took Mooney's perspective. (Science and New Scientist made a reasonable effort to give the opposing views too, and at least they got scientists.)
There was an editorial in Science signed by science advisors to presidents over 30 years denouncing the Bush Administration -- including many Republicans. Even Republican scientists said that they've never seen political pressure like this (and I saw political pressure on scientists under the Carter and Clinton Administration). The unanimity among scientists really is striking, bipartisan and unprecedented. It's always possible that they could all be wrong, but it's better than the evidence we usually have for other policy decisions (like Star Wars), and given the risks, you can't just say, "Let's put off action for 10 years while we get more evidence," like George W. Bush does.
So as a journalist, much of what Mooney does is merely summing up what highly-credentialed PhD-level scientists are saying, giving the arguments on both sides, coming to conclusions, and giving it a context. The scientists say that he's reporting their views accurately. Furthermore much of what he does is reporting on politics, and it's nice, but not necessary, to be a scientist to do that. (Gerard Piel, the publisher of Scientific American, was a history major.)
Lots of people do that, and still turn out to be wrong. But Mooney got generally good reviews in the scientific journals. He took a lot of stuff I read and made it easier for me to understand the context. In my reading, he does seem to have a good grasp of the subject. He wouldn't be qualified to do the hard science, like look at temperature data in ice cores and make a scientific judgment about it, but he doesn't make hard scientific decisions, he just talks to other people who do.
That's what qualifies him to write a book and report on this. He could be wrong, but he's at least as qualified as any journalist, columnist, or economist. Of course you have a perfect right to be skeptical, and you provide a useful service when you are skeptical. But I think there are good answers to your objections.
I don't suppose anyone would argue that the President of the United States has a fundamental grasp of these concepts.:)
You're lucky, I'm an obsessive note-taker. You'll have to supply your own verbs, though.
Talk, How to protect your open source projects from poisonous people, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian W. Fitzpatrick, January 25, 2007, Subversion developers from Google explain their experiences. Google TechTalks. http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=-4216011961 522818645
Open Source Developers Speakers Series, 4. Google engineers, Chicago.
"Abstract: Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful. These people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. Come learn how to identify these people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail your project. Told through a series of (often amusing) real life anecdotes and experiences."
Most important resource is the attention and focus of your community. Poisonous people can show up, distract your developers, cause emotional drain.
On purpose or accident. More often unintentionally.
Perfectionism. Design document went on forever.
Painting the bike shed. Enginers hand in huge document for design of the nuclear power plant, approved in 5 minutes. Week later, come in with blueprint of bike shed they want to build, debate for months on what color.
"Call bikeshed."
People want to put their stamp.
Habits that make healthy open source community: Politeness, Respect, Trust, Humility.
Pick a direction and limit it. Subversion mission statement, "To create a competing replacement for CVS." Could point to it when people wanted to expand it. That's not in the mission statement.
Google Web Toolkit. Ajax development environment in Java.
Mailing list, primary communication. Read archives first. If they don't, they're disrespecting everybody's time.
One vehement dissenter, half the messages from one person. Call people out on it, filibustering. Consensus-based community, consensus derailed.
Document history, including mistakes. Standard format, consistent log messages. Dealt with client in old job, guy said, I can't get my programmers to write in a standard format. Responded, I've got 30 volunteers off the Internet, they follow detailed format, and you're telling me you can't get your paid employees to folow a standard format?
Commit email.
No Powerpoints. Some people go off and write big Powerpoints, come back with big document later, nobody can go through it. We have to see what you're doing as you go along.
Bus factor. How many people would have to be hit by a bus for you to wind up in a pile of shit. Project that depended on one guy, assign him a collaborator, share expertise.
Egalitarianism, not owning, no names. Good coder insisted on name, blackmail, you can't use it if I don't get my name, refused his contribution. Not willing to sacrifice our community for your ego.
Expand community. Culture perpetuates.
Founder can be booted, too possessive of his code, voted him off.
Voting is a last resort. It shows consensus didn't work.
Identify people. Put them on Bozo list.
Good cop, bad cop. Guy can turn out to be good, make valuable contributions.
Can identify them early on. Usually have a nick like CRAZYJOE, lots of different nicks, lots of caps, exclamation points.
Can't pick up on mood, ask questions they could look up, which disrespects other peoples' time.
Blackmail. Trolling. Hostility. Continually object.
"Patches welcome" is the open-source term by which you dismiss people. Send in your patch.
Is this debate worth it? Ignore them.
Concentrate on what they have to say, ignore the hostility.
One guy challenged basis of Subversion, people responded emotionally. Wasted 2 days of my time.
Good cop. Sometimes people look like trolls, actually miscommunication. Not native speakers of English. Give benefit of doubt, sometime
Pump and dump violates the securities laws, right? The SEC's own web site calls them "fraudulent".
So why can't they track these guys down and prosecute them? The SEC has a pretty good investigative force. They tracked down Martha Stewart. They subpoenaed her phone records and everything.
You have to buy these stocks from a broker, so that leaves a paper trail. They have to report stock purchases to the IRS, if nothing else. You can't buy stocks with stacks of currency, can you?
The guys who are behind the pump and dump schemes by definition will buy the stock at the beginning, send out 10 million spam to get the suckers buying, dump the stock when the price goes up, and leave the suckers holding the bag.
So why can't the SEC track these guys down through the brokers, and prosecute them for this pattern of buy and sell that is obviously fraudulent?
Will somebody who understands this better than me explain to me why the SEC can't enforce the law?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD
That's just the web site of PubMed, which is the index to the entire peer-reviewed medical literature.
That's like saying, "If you go to the library, you'll find lots of books that prove my point." Without mentioning which books they are.
(If you do want to look something up on Pubmed, Lancet, the journal that started the whole thing, now says that mercury-containing vaccines are harmless and save lots of lives.)
Your post makes a lot of sense. I've been explaining that to my friends all week. Humans are not big mice. And those mice didn't have real (mouse) cancers. Those
Canadians did great work and I hope they get a grant, but it's pretty early research.
Over the last 20 years, I can count on my fingers the cures for cancer that didn't pan out: Interferon, monoclonal antibodies (radioactive and regular), angiogenesis inhibitors....
MABs and TK inhibitors seem to be working well but it's mostly a few months to a few years longer survival (at $30,000 a month for some of them).
There are a few rare cancers that have been "cured" in the last 20 years, in the sense that they don't come back, such as childhood leukemia (although the treatment causes *other* cancers) and testicular cancer.
It's almost impossible to get all the cancer cells, and the ones that are left over are subject to Darwinian selection for drug resistance. I'm sure it can be done, but not by confusing a lottery ticket with a winner.
I've talked to librarians and information scientists, and they talk about "controlled vocabulary". They told me one of the best systems was Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi which is an index of essentially every article published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Every article is "tagged" with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) keywords, and you can search the database for those keywords. If they can use "heart" or "cardiac", they have to decide which one to use (they use "cardiac"). They have keywords to separate human studies from animal studies. Here's more explanation http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html It's basically open source.
A similar system in law is the Westlaw key word system. The New York Times used to have a great keyword index, but I can't find it in the NYT online.
If your wife is a doctor or nurse, there's a good chance that she will get a false positive. Hospitals are promoting alcohol-based hand sanitizers, because they reduce the spread of infection. But these sanitizers also cause false-positives in alcohol tests, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal recently. (Even the guy who developed the test said the way they were using it was wrong.) So doctors and nurses are getting their licenses revoked based on what everybody agrees are false positives.
What other alcohol-related products do you carry in your car? My old chemistry professor used to clean the ice off his windshield with methyl alcohol. Listerine is 27% alcohol.
If you have 100 million people in the U.S. driving a car, and you have a system with a false positive rate of 1 in 10,000, then how many false positives are you going to get?
I'm disappointed that yours was the only post on the list to make this point.
I'm disappointed that a reasonably intelligent group of people on this list, most of whom have taken a few science courses, don't understand the difference between a molecular model, an in vitro study, an in vivo study, and [skipping several steps] a human trial.
I read the New England Journal of Medicine every week, and they have a more promising development than this every month. I read Science every week, and they have 10 equally promising developments every week. And sometimes I go to a meeting like ASCO and they have 10,000 developments as promising as this. I wish more of them would turn out to be useful drugs. But we're lucky to get one significantly useful new cancer drug every year.
And when you get all done, and look at the survival curves, most of them will extend survival for 1, 2, 3 months. A drug that extends survival in colon cancer for 6 months is a big deal, and some of them cost $30,000 to $60,000 a month.
There are a few fortunate exceptions. I know somebody who's alive today because she's taking imatinib http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib But it's annoying to see every minor step hyped into a cancer cure. Ignorance is annoying.
Fair is fair. If you do a Google search on "Texas Christian University" you'll see that they have a biology department that spoke up for teaching darwinian evolution, in a state where it's not always safe to do that.
Plus, John Horner teaches in the biology department.
Plus, they have lots of nice chicks in the nursing school.
That guy was so stupid, I feel sorry for him, out of atheist charity.
Did anybody notice that this BBC story is based entirely on a report, "McAfee Virtual Criminology Report http://www.softmart.com/mcafee/docs/McAfee%20NA%20 Virtual%20Criminology%20Report.pdf and an interview with one of its authors?
This report -- from 2005 -- doesn't have anything that you couldn't have already read on Slashdot or the newspapers.
The BBC didn't check McAfee's claims with another source. The McAfee report doesn't say anything about criminals paying tuition for students to study computer science. The McAfee security analyst didn't give any details. The BBC didn't ask him the obvious question, "How do you know?" Did he talk to a student like this? Did he find it in court records? Or did he hear it from another security expert after a few drinks?
Has McAfee been reliable in the past?
As a traditional journalist on paper and now on the Internet, I would say that you're a journalist if you have readers.
I started an informal email newsletter, and whenever I had to establish my bona fides, I would say, "I have 600 readers in your field." That got me into press conferences and got people to spend time with me for interviews.
It's a lot more impressive to have a million readers or listeners, but at the time of the American revolution, there were a lot of newspapers with 600 readers. I used to write for business newsletters with a readership of 600 industry executives.
But if you talk about rights of freedom of expression, I think that anybody who writes anything has the same rights that I do. That's true in the U.S. under the Constitution. If you write a letter to a friend denouncing the President, you still have those rights under the Constitution. If you write rants that you hang up on trees and nobody reads, you still have those rights under the Constitution.
A big newspaper like the New York Times has a big legal department to fight libel suits and subpoenas. They also have a publisher and board members with connections to politically influential people. They have the power to enforce those rights. They also get special favors, like admission to White House press conferences. But those are privileges (perhaps unfair) that go beyond rights. Those are the perks you get with a $1 billion a year business.
That reminds me of a Playboy cartoon.
Two phlegmatic old men are sitting in armchairs in a club.
One says to the other, "I remember how I made my first million. My father said, 'Son, here's a million dollars. Don't lose it.'"
Today you don't have to sit around filing triangular gears. It's been automated.m l
m l
http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/kyth5.ht
And here's the specs http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/kyth2.ht
Those old guys did a pretty good job. Without even electric grinding tools.
Electricity! When we wanted electricity, we had to rub amber. Or get a torpedo fish.
There's a pretty well-established concept in economics called the "Paradox of choice."
In one experiment, as I recall they set up a display of different flavors of jam in a supermarket.
First they set up a display of 6 types of jam. They sold a certain number.
Then they set up a display with 24 types of jam. They sold far fewer. People were confused so they skipped it.
More choices might seem better, but it's not better if the greater choice is more difficult to make than the smaller choice.
Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate economist, said that it's inefficient to make the very best decision, because the effort of making the perfect decision is greater than the resources gained by the decision. It's better to make a reasonably good decision.
A reasonably good decision is made by considering a few choices, not an infinite nubmer of choices. qed.
You're making a good point which is well known to people who do the statistics for medical tests.
If you have a witness look through a database of people who were arrested for a similar crime in the same neighborhood -- say, 1,000 people -- then the chances of a false match are *relatively* low, because you've only got 1,000 people to choose from.
But if the witness looks through a database of all drivers license holders in the entire state -- say, 10 million people -- then the chances of a false match are almost certain. If 1 person in a thousand looks like me, which is realistic, you'll get 10,000 matches. It depends on how close a match you require, but eyewitness identification is not too close to start with.
Then all the cops have to do is go through the list of 10,000 suspects and find the first one who doesn't have a good alibi and can't afford a good lawyer.
That's a good one.
The state department of motor vehicles license photo database raises an interesting opportunity.
If I were a defense lawyer, and my client were being charged on the basis of eyewitness testimony, I'd go to the license database and pull out the 12 drivers who most resembled my client. Then I'd line the photos up and ask the witness to pick out my client. Unless my client's face was very unusual, the witness wouldn't be able to do it.
(The Innocence Project at Cardoza College used DNA testing to find people who were convicted of crimes but were really innocent. They said that the most common reason for false convictions was mistaken eyewitness identification. Scientific studies show the limitations to eyewitness testimony, but defense lawyers can't use that in court.)
>I wonder what the false positive rate is.
It will be like the Do Not Fly list.
Years ago, Scientific American had a story about a prototype system for facial recognition created of students at Brooklyn College. They had a database of about 1,000 faces, and they showed the 2 most similar and the 2 most different. The 2 most different were very different. The 2 most similar were so similar, I couldn't tell them apart. So back-of-the-envelope, I'd say about 2 faces in 1,000 will be so similar you can't tell them apart.
(Surely on Slashdot somebody must know the current research.)
So if there are 300 million people in the U.S., and you have a common-looking face, you'll have a close match to 300,000 people. Or 8,000 people in New York City.
(In New York a popular Catholic priest was arrested, based on a victim's identification, and charged with rape. His parisioners couln't believe it. Finally the cops found another guy, and charged him with the rape. Finally, they found a *third* guy, and he seemed to be the one. The newspapers published the 3 pictures. They really looked alike. Funny thing was, they were different racial types, too. One guy was hispanic, another guy was Italian.)
I'm surprised Slashdotters haven't figured out how to beat the system.
If you're a principal, it's very easy to cheat and get bonuses without improving reading at all.
Simply expel the poor-scoring students.
That's what happened in Texas when George W. Bush was governor, and instituted this free-market bonus idea.
Sure, you could re-program the system to track that. Call me in 10 years when you've done it.
The New York Times had a few front-page stories about this. Needless to say, most of the students who were expelled were black.
Bush took some of the very people who were responsible for this and appointed them to high positions in his administation.
Really, do you expect someone who had so much contempt for his own education as GWB to understand education?
You mean Scandanavian socialism is so attractive that it draws people from all over the world?
And people who grow up in Scandanavian socialism have such a strong work ethic that, even though they would get paid almost as much from the welfare system, they work anyway?
Is that a failure or a success?
I don't know what you call Communism, but socialism is working pretty well in the Scandanavian countries, as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders just told Amy Goodman. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/0 8/1457245
e t_Union (How many immigrant computer programmers and engineers do you know in your own country who were trained in the USSR?) Don't forget, they put the first man in space.
You want games? I heard Linus Torvalds interviewed by Terry Gross: "I was very lucky. When I was in the university, I didn't have to pay tuition, and I had a stipend for my living expenses. I could spend all day writing computer games." (Quoting from memory.) He wanted a faster OS, and that's how he started to develop Linux.
Let's take real Communism. I once met Loren Graham, the MIT professor who was America's top expert on Soviet science, and the only one who understood the Soviets in their own terms. He gave a lecture in which he detailed all the failings of Soviet science.
I asked him what the Soviets did *well*. He told me, "their education system." Under Communism, literacy is 100% (everywhere in the world). But beyond that their technical education was among the best in the world. They educated not just an elite, but millions of scientists and engineers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_in_the_Sovi
Of course the Soviet Union was a frequently-brutal dictatorship -- until Gorbachev. They didn't have the freedom that white people had in the United States.
Today, Russia is a good model of what America would be like if the Republican free-market conservatives took over: a government that can't collect taxes, run by oligarchs and dictators, where you can't get education or even health care if you can't pay for it.
And if you destroy the government, so your rich friends don't have to pay taxes (as Republican ideologues like Grover Norquist want to do), you have no money for basic research. According to Science magazine, the well-funded Soviet scientific research enterprise is gone. Their scientists are driving cabs and opening restaurants, not creating computer games.