Tubes going into your body are a source of nasty infections. These tubes will need to get cleaned regularly, with the additional complication of highly perishable food in it.
Yes, the original article was written by 4 authors, 3 of which were business professors (including the lead author). This represents "interdisciplinary" New Age research at its worst.
Most of the time, when the media reports "life expectancy", they describe life expectancy at birth. This is greatly affected by infant mortality. The USA considers all miscarriages, sometimes even abortions, as "infant mortality", whereas many European countries exclude such deaths. Differences in life expectancy conditioned on survival to adulthood is quite modest across countries; it has not changed much in the past 100 years. I did my dissertation on this topic.
- When you were little, white people came from the sky and asked you to make a sad face for the camera. - The government, rebels, and UN peacekeepers all shoot at you. - You've ever drank water from a mud puddle. - You had a bean for dinner last night. - You've never seen your own face in a mirror. - Escalators terrify you. - The village witch doctor can let you talk telepathically through the cell phone. - You got a pack of cigarettes for your 10th birthday. - White people tell you to have savings accounts and get educated, but banks steal your money and schools just produce unemployed people.
I'm all for alternative perspectives, but I've read many Al Jazeera articles that got the facts wrong, were full of grammatical errors, and just didn't seem very educated. A lot of their articles just seem to be Western news that is a few days old, with more sensationalist spins added.
Hmm, interesting. So it spreads from zip code to zip code, but sometimes to places where there are fewer children. (We get plenty of low-income, uninsured children since we are a Catholic hospital system.)
I do know the detailed street addresses of patients, so it may come in handy at some point.
We have no way of knowing anything at that level of detail -- what percent of the population as a whole was infected, how many were vaccinated. The government does not have such information either. What you describe is for hypothetical simulations. I'm just working with ER managers to enable efficient resource allocation: how many flu patients do we expect today? Where are we relative to seasonal baseline?
>My guess is it's IBNR (probably not the term to use, but look it up and you'll get the gist) rather than a genuine fall off in counts.
Thanks, I looked it up. As for doubting a genuine fall-off, the same logic could be used to argue against the existence of upward spikes. And who knows, maybe "flu epidemics" are really just mass hysteria. But if I made such an assertion, I would have my sanity as a scientist questioned.;)
>Check for correlation between the down spikes and seasonal spikes in pollen and mold spore counts.
Good point, I'll check that also. There is a new paper that found a link between humidity and flu counts. I'm in the process of acquiring local historic weather data.
I am a statistician. In light of this year's early flu epidemic, I am tasked with modeling ER flu counts as a function of time.
When I plot the residual graph (observed - expected), I get upward spikes lasting about a week, corresponding to epidemics of particular strains. But there are also downward spikes lasting about a week. They occur at random, independent of the upward spikes. So what do I call such downward spikes? I've searched around but there is no antonym for "epidemic".
And I remember a demonstration from a chemistry 101 class where a professor put a blowtorch to an air-filled balloon vs. a hydrogen-filled balloon. The latter had a much louder explosion.
Every year, without fail, there is an article about the blimp renaissance. Been that way since the 1930s. Akron calls itself the blimp capital of the world. I remember a college job fair where there was some kooky company from Quebec that made hydrogen-filled blimps, and they insisted that hydrogen is not flammable.
Could it be that the theories of cosmology and evolution, as taught in high school textbooks today, are in fact not so strong? There is no particular evidence that the sun had to form before the Earth did; recent findings suggest that the milky way is full of billions of orphan planets, and Earth may well have been floating around before the Sun came about. The orphan planets may account for a good portion of the "90% of matter in the universe that is dark". Maybe a minority of orphan planets eventually accumulate enough matter to turn into a star? The theory that stars form first, then planets emerge from the dust disks, are merely based on what we are able to observe with optical telescopes (so many blobs).
Nor is there evidence that evolution inevitably favors the formation of more complex life forms over time; there are plenty of cases of animals shrinking into smaller, simpler forms over time; any number of viruses and protists could have arisen from more complex organisms. Gene transfers between different species, once thought rare or impossible, are now known to be common. The assumption that similarity of DNA reflects evolutionary kinship is a strong faith; they could have converged to the same sequence over time. Both Big-Bangism and evolutionism rely on isotope dating, assuming that radioactive decay rates are exactly the same over billions of years, and the short experiments we have done and our limited knowledge of nuclear chemistry is sufficient to accurately date objects billions of years old.
If we are willing to make giant extrapolations into the past, then could we also make giant extrapolations into the future, where sufficiently advanced life forms are able to turn into God? Then God can do whatever he wants, recreating the stories of the bible and what not.
But apparently, it is intolerable for scientists to admit they don't know.
So a more honest science curriculum might acknowledge the huge gaps and leaps of faith, amounting to flicking a cigarette lighter to "prove" the big bang theory (Oh wait, did I just describe CERN?). But instead, the theories are taught as "facts", and it is against the law for students to question them.
Have we advanced much since the inquisition? Galileo was placed under house arrest for scientific misconduct, when he had no evidence to back his theories. How backward will our theories today seem to future generations, when 20th-century theories of evolution will seem as fantastical as Egyptian mythology, big bang theory as anachronistic as phlogistont theory?
So according to scientists, it's better to pray to the God of extrapolation and sweeping assumptions instead. Last I checked, if a belief cannot be tested, replicated, or falsified, then by definition it is not science. Where are the experiments to recreate the universe, the process of evolution?
What has scientists sooooo afraid of the perception that they don't know everything? Last I checked, the big bang theory is controversial within legitimate science, as are many details of how evolution happened. There is the "survival of the fittest" dogma, but then more recent findings deprecate this dogma. But apparently, it's ok for scientists to outlaw teachings they don't like.
In case the "pro-science" crowd thinks otherwise, plenty of people do not develop immunity after receiving a vaccine. For example, Gardasil is only about 38% effective in preventing cervical cancer. In some cases, the vaccine can cause the disease itself. Or is that too heretical for the pro-science crowd?
Back in the 1980s when I grew up, there was a widely held view that only autistic personalities who were incapable of interacting with other human beings would want to program computers. I liked programming, and my sixth grade teachers felt I should talk to a psychologist.
Today, people no longer believe only autistics would want to program, but there is a strange view that only people under age 30 should program. Why? Should book writers retire at age 30 too?
I don't believe high-school students anywhere study nuanced history.
I learned most of this stuff from my 5th grade world history textbook, actually.
I am reasonably certain that these are not covered in high-school curriculum since all the books I read about every single one of these in detail, had a certain elite vibe to them.
You're right, a lot of high school textbooks promote liberal lies such as that Christians burned down the library at Alexandria, or that the Church refused to accept Galileo's theories. The church did not have much of a problem with Galileo's theories; many priests of the day accepted them. The Church tried him for scientific misconduct, where he presented no evidence for his theories, took credit for the ideas of others, and when asked to present evidence, either made up data or just ridiculed others. Today, such a scientist would be sent to prison for fraud. The church placed him under house arrest instead.
So I assume that the recent Mars Rover got there entirely by a faith.
At least, we have faith it is not a made-up story by NASA. These days, it's rather easy to create video images that look convincing.
What alternatives? The only theory where there is any scientific activity is around the theory of evolution.
Do they teach disclaimers that scientists aren't quite sure anymore if we came out of Africa or Asia? How much modern human DNA comes from interbreeding between the myriad species of hominids? Or that gene transfer between species is impossible.... unless bacteria and viruses do transfer genes between different species of hosts all the time. Or that evolution does not always go "forward" in the direction of bigger or more complex organisms. Who knows how many bacteria or viruses today used to be plants or animals? Archaea were supposed to be "extremely rare bacteria" found only in hot springs, but now they are all around us, and our intestines contain billions of them, and we haven't begun to understand them. The "kingdoms" of life keep changing by the year, since there are lots of organisms that don't quite fit any. We assume DNA similarities must always reflect common ancestry, as opposed to convergence by independent processes in different species, or host transfers. So yes, it is a shaky house of cards invented by Darwin, who had never heard of Mendel's genetics. Today, evolution proponents consider Darwin's "survival of the fittest" to be an embarrassing simplification that reflects the bigotry of Victorian class values; early supporters of evolution theory included eugenecists who proposed mass sterilization of children with low IQs. Until the 1950s, the scientific establishment continued to support this view; today, the same mentality is described in terms of birth control for reducing the population of undesirable races from poorer countries.
Creationists haven't exactly come up with a scientific program.
For the most part, they don't try to. What we lack is a counterpoint to the blind faith and sordid history of evolutionism.
> For example, you will not find as many books as written in the west criticizing the injustice of the west to other... anywhere else (for me that is a sign of maturity... and I am not a westerner).
Really? Are you sure that students in the West do not learn about slavery, Cortez and the Incas, smallpox blankets, the atrocities of the crusades, the opium war?
(Non-Western nations did comparable things too, but the standard response there is often denial.)
> I challenge you to cite *any* science that does not do this.
>"outlaw any questioning of scientific theories" ??
Where are the scientists who welcome the teaching of alternatives to the theory of evolution? No, they lobby hard to pass laws making it illegal to teach any ideas that question the theory. Every year, a fragment of a jaw bone found in the "wrong" place causes scientists to go into a frenzy to rewrite the tree of evolution, but that's besides the point.
> Are You asking for a 5-billion-year-long experiment ??
Yes. Otherwise the assumptions are non-falsifiable, and we might as well believe the writing on stone tablets found on a mountain somewhere.
>None of this seems to have anything to do with science.
Really? Do you think scientific reasoning is not based on statistics?
>You have created a strawman of how science works and are beating it with all your might.
To the contrary, the standard operating procedure of science is to create the straw man of the null hypothesis, then beat it with data which will contradict the straw man no matter what happens.
>Science often has to deal in things that cannot be directly observed....
Indeed, such experiments often rely on logistic regression based on "yes" and "no" answers for observable data. Here's a basic flaw of logistic regression that most scientists do not realize: if some covariate is a perfect predictor of outcome, the p-value will not be close to zero. It will be 1 or very close to 1, failing to reject the null hypothesis, because the Fisher information matrix blows up to infinity. So if there are "absolute truths" hidden in the data, a scientific experiment will fail to detect it. I pointed this out to a room full of genetics researchers, and most of them were stumped. Their research depended entirely upon p-values being close to zero. But if a gene was in fact a perfect predictor of outcome, the experiments (as they ran it) would be guaranteed never to find them.
I already have. Scientists like to say that their theories are backed by "mathematical reasoning", but this is a false statement. As any mathematician will tell you, mathematics is a closed system of logical reasoning with no implied relation to the physical world. Science is backed by statistical reasoning, not mathematics.
When one gets into the philosophical questions of what a p-value really means, whether frequentism or Bayesianism is a better model of the universe, then scientific reasoning will become very dubious indeed. About 99% of science is based on linear regression, yet linear regression contains incredibly bold assumptions (e.g. homogeneity of variance, zero measurement errors in covariates, normality of residuals). What is the null hypothesis and the alternative? What if the null hypothesis is unrealistic, and a better model would test between two possible parameter values? When the latter is imposed, most scientific experiments lack adequate sample sizes. If scientific journals required tests for normality of residuals, then 80% or more of existing papers would disappear. Other than sample averages, true normal distributions are rarely encountered in nature.
Slashdot Mirror
Tubes going into your body are a source of nasty infections. These tubes will need to get cleaned regularly, with the additional complication of highly perishable food in it.
Yes, the original article was written by 4 authors, 3 of which were business professors (including the lead author). This represents "interdisciplinary" New Age research at its worst.
So an accountant hand-picked a dozen "entrepreneurs", and decided that the squiggly MRI images are better than the other hand-picked "managers"?
Most of the time, when the media reports "life expectancy", they describe life expectancy at birth. This is greatly affected by infant mortality. The USA considers all miscarriages, sometimes even abortions, as "infant mortality", whereas many European countries exclude such deaths. Differences in life expectancy conditioned on survival to adulthood is quite modest across countries; it has not changed much in the past 100 years. I did my dissertation on this topic.
- When you were little, white people came from the sky and asked you to make a sad face for the camera.
- The government, rebels, and UN peacekeepers all shoot at you.
- You've ever drank water from a mud puddle.
- You had a bean for dinner last night.
- You've never seen your own face in a mirror.
- Escalators terrify you.
- The village witch doctor can let you talk telepathically through the cell phone.
- You got a pack of cigarettes for your 10th birthday.
- White people tell you to have savings accounts and get educated, but banks steal your money and schools just produce unemployed people.
I'm all for alternative perspectives, but I've read many Al Jazeera articles that got the facts wrong, were full of grammatical errors, and just didn't seem very educated. A lot of their articles just seem to be Western news that is a few days old, with more sensationalist spins added.
I've noticed that people who are underachievers in school often compensate with high social intelligence, seeming to know every trick in the book.
Hmm, interesting. So it spreads from zip code to zip code, but sometimes to places where there are fewer children. (We get plenty of low-income, uninsured children since we are a Catholic hospital system.)
I do know the detailed street addresses of patients, so it may come in handy at some point.
We have no way of knowing anything at that level of detail -- what percent of the population as a whole was infected, how many were vaccinated. The government does not have such information either. What you describe is for hypothetical simulations. I'm just working with ER managers to enable efficient resource allocation: how many flu patients do we expect today? Where are we relative to seasonal baseline?
Thank you. I work for a medical center and the counts are for a children's emergency room. So the at-risk population is constant.
>My guess is it's IBNR (probably not the term to use, but look it up and you'll get the gist) rather than a genuine fall off in counts.
Thanks, I looked it up. As for doubting a genuine fall-off, the same logic could be used to argue against the existence of upward spikes. And who knows, maybe "flu epidemics" are really just mass hysteria. But if I made such an assertion, I would have my sanity as a scientist questioned. ;)
>Check for correlation between the down spikes and seasonal spikes in pollen and mold spore counts.
Good point, I'll check that also. There is a new paper that found a link between humidity and flu counts. I'm in the process of acquiring local historic weather data.
I am a statistician. In light of this year's early flu epidemic, I am tasked with modeling ER flu counts as a function of time.
When I plot the residual graph (observed - expected), I get upward spikes lasting about a week, corresponding to epidemics of particular strains. But there are also downward spikes lasting about a week. They occur at random, independent of the upward spikes. So what do I call such downward spikes? I've searched around but there is no antonym for "epidemic".
And I remember a demonstration from a chemistry 101 class where a professor put a blowtorch to an air-filled balloon vs. a hydrogen-filled balloon. The latter had a much louder explosion.
Every year, without fail, there is an article about the blimp renaissance. Been that way since the 1930s. Akron calls itself the blimp capital of the world. I remember a college job fair where there was some kooky company from Quebec that made hydrogen-filled blimps, and they insisted that hydrogen is not flammable.
Could it be that the theories of cosmology and evolution, as taught in high school textbooks today, are in fact not so strong? There is no particular evidence that the sun had to form before the Earth did; recent findings suggest that the milky way is full of billions of orphan planets, and Earth may well have been floating around before the Sun came about. The orphan planets may account for a good portion of the "90% of matter in the universe that is dark". Maybe a minority of orphan planets eventually accumulate enough matter to turn into a star? The theory that stars form first, then planets emerge from the dust disks, are merely based on what we are able to observe with optical telescopes (so many blobs).
Nor is there evidence that evolution inevitably favors the formation of more complex life forms over time; there are plenty of cases of animals shrinking into smaller, simpler forms over time; any number of viruses and protists could have arisen from more complex organisms. Gene transfers between different species, once thought rare or impossible, are now known to be common. The assumption that similarity of DNA reflects evolutionary kinship is a strong faith; they could have converged to the same sequence over time. Both Big-Bangism and evolutionism rely on isotope dating, assuming that radioactive decay rates are exactly the same over billions of years, and the short experiments we have done and our limited knowledge of nuclear chemistry is sufficient to accurately date objects billions of years old.
If we are willing to make giant extrapolations into the past, then could we also make giant extrapolations into the future, where sufficiently advanced life forms are able to turn into God? Then God can do whatever he wants, recreating the stories of the bible and what not.
But apparently, it is intolerable for scientists to admit they don't know.
So a more honest science curriculum might acknowledge the huge gaps and leaps of faith, amounting to flicking a cigarette lighter to "prove" the big bang theory (Oh wait, did I just describe CERN?). But instead, the theories are taught as "facts", and it is against the law for students to question them.
Have we advanced much since the inquisition? Galileo was placed under house arrest for scientific misconduct, when he had no evidence to back his theories. How backward will our theories today seem to future generations, when 20th-century theories of evolution will seem as fantastical as Egyptian mythology, big bang theory as anachronistic as phlogistont theory?
So according to scientists, it's better to pray to the God of extrapolation and sweeping assumptions instead. Last I checked, if a belief cannot be tested, replicated, or falsified, then by definition it is not science. Where are the experiments to recreate the universe, the process of evolution?
What has scientists sooooo afraid of the perception that they don't know everything? Last I checked, the big bang theory is controversial within legitimate science, as are many details of how evolution happened. There is the "survival of the fittest" dogma, but then more recent findings deprecate this dogma. But apparently, it's ok for scientists to outlaw teachings they don't like.
In case the "pro-science" crowd thinks otherwise, plenty of people do not develop immunity after receiving a vaccine. For example, Gardasil is only about 38% effective in preventing cervical cancer. In some cases, the vaccine can cause the disease itself. Or is that too heretical for the pro-science crowd?
Back in the 1980s when I grew up, there was a widely held view that only autistic personalities who were incapable of interacting with other human beings would want to program computers. I liked programming, and my sixth grade teachers felt I should talk to a psychologist.
Today, people no longer believe only autistics would want to program, but there is a strange view that only people under age 30 should program. Why? Should book writers retire at age 30 too?
I don't believe high-school students anywhere study nuanced history.
I learned most of this stuff from my 5th grade world history textbook, actually.
I am reasonably certain that these are not covered in high-school curriculum since all the books I read about every single one of these in detail, had a certain elite vibe to them.
You're right, a lot of high school textbooks promote liberal lies such as that Christians burned down the library at Alexandria, or that the Church refused to accept Galileo's theories. The church did not have much of a problem with Galileo's theories; many priests of the day accepted them. The Church tried him for scientific misconduct, where he presented no evidence for his theories, took credit for the ideas of others, and when asked to present evidence, either made up data or just ridiculed others. Today, such a scientist would be sent to prison for fraud. The church placed him under house arrest instead.
So I assume that the recent Mars Rover got there entirely by a faith.
At least, we have faith it is not a made-up story by NASA. These days, it's rather easy to create video images that look convincing.
What alternatives? The only theory where there is any scientific activity is around the theory of evolution.
Do they teach disclaimers that scientists aren't quite sure anymore if we came out of Africa or Asia? How much modern human DNA comes from interbreeding between the myriad species of hominids? Or that gene transfer between species is impossible.... unless bacteria and viruses do transfer genes between different species of hosts all the time. Or that evolution does not always go "forward" in the direction of bigger or more complex organisms. Who knows how many bacteria or viruses today used to be plants or animals? Archaea were supposed to be "extremely rare bacteria" found only in hot springs, but now they are all around us, and our intestines contain billions of them, and we haven't begun to understand them. The "kingdoms" of life keep changing by the year, since there are lots of organisms that don't quite fit any. We assume DNA similarities must always reflect common ancestry, as opposed to convergence by independent processes in different species, or host transfers. So yes, it is a shaky house of cards invented by Darwin, who had never heard of Mendel's genetics. Today, evolution proponents consider Darwin's "survival of the fittest" to be an embarrassing simplification that reflects the bigotry of Victorian class values; early supporters of evolution theory included eugenecists who proposed mass sterilization of children with low IQs. Until the 1950s, the scientific establishment continued to support this view; today, the same mentality is described in terms of birth control for reducing the population of undesirable races from poorer countries.
Creationists haven't exactly come up with a scientific program.
For the most part, they don't try to. What we lack is a counterpoint to the blind faith and sordid history of evolutionism.
> For example, you will not find as many books as written in the west criticizing the injustice of the west to other... anywhere else (for me that is a sign of maturity... and I am not a westerner).
Really? Are you sure that students in the West do not learn about slavery, Cortez and the Incas, smallpox blankets, the atrocities of the crusades, the opium war?
(Non-Western nations did comparable things too, but the standard response there is often denial.)
> I challenge you to cite *any* science that does not do this.
Exactly my point. It is a faith.
>"outlaw any questioning of scientific theories" ??
Where are the scientists who welcome the teaching of alternatives to the theory of evolution? No, they lobby hard to pass laws making it illegal to teach any ideas that question the theory. Every year, a fragment of a jaw bone found in the "wrong" place causes scientists to go into a frenzy to rewrite the tree of evolution, but that's besides the point.
> Are You asking for a 5-billion-year-long experiment ??
Yes. Otherwise the assumptions are non-falsifiable, and we might as well believe the writing on stone tablets found on a mountain somewhere.
>Evolution isn't statistics. Geology isn't statistics. Cosmology isn't statistics.
They absolutely are. Journals for all three topics mention p-values all the time.
>None of this seems to have anything to do with science.
Really? Do you think scientific reasoning is not based on statistics?
>You have created a strawman of how science works and are beating it with all your might.
To the contrary, the standard operating procedure of science is to create the straw man of the null hypothesis, then beat it with data which will contradict the straw man no matter what happens.
>Science often has to deal in things that cannot be directly observed....
Indeed, such experiments often rely on logistic regression based on "yes" and "no" answers for observable data. Here's a basic flaw of logistic regression that most scientists do not realize: if some covariate is a perfect predictor of outcome, the p-value will not be close to zero. It will be 1 or very close to 1, failing to reject the null hypothesis, because the Fisher information matrix blows up to infinity. So if there are "absolute truths" hidden in the data, a scientific experiment will fail to detect it. I pointed this out to a room full of genetics researchers, and most of them were stumped. Their research depended entirely upon p-values being close to zero. But if a gene was in fact a perfect predictor of outcome, the experiments (as they ran it) would be guaranteed never to find them.
I already have. Scientists like to say that their theories are backed by "mathematical reasoning", but this is a false statement. As any mathematician will tell you, mathematics is a closed system of logical reasoning with no implied relation to the physical world. Science is backed by statistical reasoning, not mathematics.
When one gets into the philosophical questions of what a p-value really means, whether frequentism or Bayesianism is a better model of the universe, then scientific reasoning will become very dubious indeed. About 99% of science is based on linear regression, yet linear regression contains incredibly bold assumptions (e.g. homogeneity of variance, zero measurement errors in covariates, normality of residuals). What is the null hypothesis and the alternative? What if the null hypothesis is unrealistic, and a better model would test between two possible parameter values? When the latter is imposed, most scientific experiments lack adequate sample sizes. If scientific journals required tests for normality of residuals, then 80% or more of existing papers would disappear. Other than sample averages, true normal distributions are rarely encountered in nature.