I was there at the opening of the Yodobashi Camera store, where they made a big fuss of how it was supposed to be the new wal-mart of Akiba. Like every other store in Tokyo with the kushidango architecture, it was small, cluttered, and overpriced; the escalators/elevators seemed to take up more floor space than the merchandise. And yes, I was taken to the smaller stores in the back streets, with their random assortments of wires, diodes, screws, and other junk. And the anime fetishist stores with their oh-so-precious original sketches. Some store, whatever it was called, had a TV series on DVD on discount, which I bought, but I was hoodwinked; it showed about 10 minutes of actual show, then spent the next hour interviewing the actress when the series ended. That stuff happens a lot, the yakuza own the copyrights to the show and release scam "collections". I was also taken to the Uniqlo store in ginza, which was "revolutionizing retailing" in Japan. It was about as big as an average convenience store, with merchandise that looked like it belonged at Salvation Army. But let's not forget the prominent ads for "U-15" web sites at the train station, advertising child pornography. After so many years of embarrassing open displays as such, they're finally wisening up over there in 2010 and Ishihara is actually campaigning against it. But yeah, I don't know why I bother talking to Japanophiles about this stuff; they just get violent and deny everything. It seems nobody wants to talk about what's really good for Japan, not the Japanese or the Japapnophiles.
I love how people assume I only went to the duty-free shops, or that I don't speak Japanese. I was born in Japan and it is my native language. I've been to shops in both the back streets and forward streets. I wasn't impressed with any of it. If some people see the point to spending $200 on a plastic bikini doll, $400 on some draft sketches of an obscure anime series, or $800 on a camera because the lens can move forward and backward like some unfulfilled manhood fantasy, then I suppose they stay in business. Oh I forgot, I guess I'm talking to the slashdot crowd here. Haha.
Having lived in Tokyo before, I've never understood what the fuss is about. Most stores in Akihabara are tiny, amateurish ratholes run by guys who have no idea what they are talking about, but act snobbish to cover for it. They sell obsolete software for hundreds of dollars, out of torn boxes in poor condition. Most of the stuff will only work on the Japanese electric grid, on Asia-encoded DVD players, or on computers with Windows Japan installed on it. Despite the sales clerks' insistence, it will have problems in the USA. And cameras, they will act like they never heard of a camera that costs less than $300. If I tell them I just want something simple, that doesn't have a million buttons and strange features on it, then they are deeply offended and just turn their back to me. It is the last place I would want to go to buy anything. Between Wal-mart or ordering off the internet, these kind of places serve no particular purpose anymore.
Ethics training will not prevent all terrorists. On the other hand, it can serve multiple purposes:
1. Train people to avoid trouble, reducing disgruntlement; 2. Get more out of their career and be happier; 3. Identify other sources of disgruntlement, which can lead to terrorism.
The terrorists who espouse whatever cause will often turn out to have a relatively mundane cause of disgruntlement. They had not been trained to deal with wrongs dealt to them, or how to avoid doing wrongs themselves. None of this is obvious from mere childhood morals.
There is more to ethics than just personal privacy. It is ingrained in everything we do. In the long run, good ethics lead to having more successful relationships with other people, and a happier life.
What you say is typical of engineering majors. However, in the health professions, I have received extensive ethical training, and continue to receive them. The complex dilemmas encountered by health professionals cannot be reasonably taught by mere "good parenting". Every action we take has ethical consequences which are not obvious; I continue to learn a lot from the seminars. Engineers believe they know how to think several steps ahead, but they receive no training in ethics and believe it's all just "parenting".
Having been in engineering majors before, I can testify that engineers receive little or no training in ethics. Antisocial attitudes are rife; they are trained to look down on other people, and think it's "funny" to install a virus on someone's computer or blow something up with a pipe bomb. I was a software engineer for 10 years, but I got fed up with these attitudes, so I moved into the health professions. I feel much happier here; it's all about caring for other people.
I'm on a new diabetes drug that has completely shut down my appetite -- I've lost 7 pounds in 7 days. I've lost weight so rapidly that I have new wrinkles on my fingertips, as if I've been in the bathtub too long. (I lowered the dose this morning and my appetite is back.)
I took a career aptitude test in the early 90s, and it told me my aptitudes were pretty much exactly in the center between various career fields. In a word, it was worthless.
Many people in the 90s were also eager to recommend "What Color Is Your Parachute?" They ask a lot of simplistic questions like "Are you a people person? yes or no." It was worthless also. I've met multiple college career counselors also, and none of them had the slightest clue what they were talking about.
Do any of these aptitude models take into account that interests shift over time? We are not insects that are hard-wired to do particular tasks. My career has taken me through various nooks and crannies ranging from radio station support staff, law enforcement, jet engine factories, to hospital transplant centers, and presently I am getting a PhD in a statistics.
Is this one of those projects like the X-prize, which keeps showing the same images year after year of rockets with bubble windows that will be commercially available "soon"?
- tasted more than one sausage at the sample counter, but didn't buy any? - sampled a grape at the supermarket? - picked up a penny at the fountain? - walked out of a coffee shop with a newspaper that you weren't sure was free? - accidentally kept something in your shopping cart, but didn't bother to return it? - borrowed the fire ax from downtown to chop down a tree in your yard? - kept shopping carts in your garage? - got a refund for your doctor's co-pay via medical supplies? - wrote a check to the church for $10, and helped yourself to $9 in change from the collection plate? - leafed through someone else's medical records at the hospital? - decorated your college dorm room with a traffic sign? - stowed extra rolls of toilet paper into your backpack? - palmed the salt & pepper shakers at the restaurant? - re-purposed the movie theater exit sign into a night light for your room? - made off with the weights from the gym? - packed the hotel towels? - reached down for a box of candy, out of sight from the cashier? - lifted a jacket off of a sleeping person in the library, because it looked so heavy on their back? - rummaged through a stranger's purse? - helped yourself to the donation can for cancer kids, so you can buy some nyquil? - sampled girl scout cookies, while pocketing the money can? - liberated a bird from the pet shop? - packed a stranger's puppy into your gym bag? - decided your in-law's jewelry looks better on your fingers? - filled your tank with somebody else's credit card, while they went inside? - scolded a kid at the park that they shouldn't own a cell phone, so you taught them a lesson? - told a skateboarder you'll show them a really cool trick, and rode away? - decided to help the local construction site by steering their crane on sunday? - helped the local fire department by driving their truck somewhere else? - helped your new neighbor by making their moving truck disappear? - made off with the manhole lid, and watched cars get destroyed?
No, don't tell kids to invent useless products, sell lemonade, or deliver newspapers. Teach kids to become health inspectors who demand $10,000 fines from lemonade stands. Teach them to go door to door asking to sign petitions to stop delivery of unwanted "free" newspapers, to save the trees. If they must sell something, teach them to sell bottles of "eco" tap water for $10 each that somehow saves a starving child in Africa. Put a pink ribbon on a $1 box of cookies and sell them for $10, because it will save cancer victims. Have your vacation paid for by asking $1 for every mile you ride on your bicycle, because this goes to a good cause.
Will we see more 5th graders "inventing" baking soda volcanoes, solar-powered flashlights, pedal-powered generators, lemon-powered batteries? But of course, we shouldn't forget the cardboard catapults or the salt crystal "jewelry". No doubt, these will save the world some day.
You'll find the same sort of "panel consensus" by scientists in the 1970s who were absolutely sure that billions of people will starve to death by the year 2000, because the world doesn't produce enough food and everybody will be malnourished.
The closer I get to obtaining my PhD, the more I'm learning that science is a group-think exercise where you had better agree with what others think, or else.
A lot of papers were published in the 1990s claiming that endocrine disruptors such as BPA will cause children to have delayed onset of puberty. Since the onset of puberty has become earlier if anything, this seems to be in the same class of research as the "harm" of fluoridated water, power line radio waves, or dental amalgam mercury.
The reported overall survival probability for an Ebola patient is supposedly 10%. But how many people/animals naturally have an immunity to Ebola, therefore they got infected but had no symptoms, therefore they never knew it? Then the marginal probability of surviving an Ebola infection may be greater than 10%.
Also, the survival probability changes over time depending on how long they were infected. An Ebola patient who has already survived, say, 5 days is more likely to survive than an Ebola patient who has survived 1 day so far.
The drug's effectiveness is likely to differ depending on how long after the infection it was administered. Also, what is the drug's lethality on uninfected patients?
Do survival durations for uninfected/infected individuals follow a predictable distribution, such as an exponential, Weibull, or log-normal distribution? Animal researchers typically assume an underlying parametric distribution, through which they can claim higher power, greater significance. But in human studies, the semiparametric Cox model (assuming a nonparametric distribution) is the standard; since this has less power, that is one reason studies often fail in human models.
Do scientists believe their own theories? Scientists disagree about everything, down to the basic principles of their specialty. I'm in graduate school getting my PhD. I've attended seminars, been in luncheons with "world-class scientists". I've witnessed them making up whatever theories they want, which fits in with their political/religious/ethnic beliefs. I was in a seminar the other day by a geneticist with a world-class reputation, who exposed a lot of seaminess in DNA sequencing technology, held to be the gospel truth in our society today. In reality, samples are easily contaminated by handling; a "sample" of caveman DNA was shown to be contaminated just by the presence of people in the same room, using standard laboratory procedures. Then she went right on to claim that modern polar bears are descended from Irish bears, and it was pretty clear she was just cheerleading her ethnic background.
Are chimps that similar to humans? Scientists have measured only mitochondrial DNA before to claim "99.9% similarity" between organisms, and that because this is DNA, it is indisputable truth. But then, if we apply the same standard to Y chromosomes, then chimps and humans are only about 50-66% similar, depending on the metric used.
And as MIT says, the chimpanzee is only the second Y chromosome to be comprehensively analyzed. Are you going to say for sure that orangutans are less related?
"HIV is relatively new. What is old are precursor viruses such as SIV (the version for apes) and FIV (the version for cats)."
But then, SIV and FIV were discovered only after HIV. I remember back then when scientists used to say that only primates can catch AIDS.
30 to 40 years ago, the tree of evolution was missing an entire kingdom of archaea. When I took high school biology, they told us that archaea are "extremely rare bacteria" that only live in hot springs. We now know this is not true; archaea are ubiquitous, only scientists didn't know where to look. Biology teachers like to show microscope pictures as "proof" of whatever theory they teach, though it's interesting they spent hundreds of years unable to find archaea that live all over the place.
We are no longer descended from sponges, according to this article -- it's the opposite of what they taught us.
And when I was in high school, they claimed that HIV was a new mutant virus that appeared in Africa in the 1950s or 60s. However, we now know that HIV has been around as long as mammals have walked the Earth.
So yes, there seem to be giant gaps in our understanding of life's origins. It will be interesting to see how different the theory of evolution will be in the future; maybe by then, "evolution" will be a dirty word and scientific zealots will demand that nobody mention it.
"However, we do know that the vast majority of similarities in DNA are due to evolutionary relationships because the genetic sequences when one graphs them by how different they are from each other form a tree, exactly as evolution would expect."
Actually, no. DNA homology has re-drawn the "evolution tree" considerably, as species that were thought to be related turned out not to be, while other "unrelated" species turned out to be related. After re-drawing the tree, scientists now say this "proves" that DNA homologies are due to evolutionary relationships. Sounds like circular logic to me.
Not so long ago, transposons (jumping genes) were thought to happen only in "lower" animals, not in humans. We now know that transposons are common in humans. They also said the same of copy number variations, or of DNA letters different from A/C/G/T.
The current dogma of genetics says that DNA homology between species is caused solely by evolutionary relationships. How long before we realize that this isn't true either?
I'm not an evolution denialist, but I do think the current scientific understanding of evolution has a religious zeal.
Could they mean that Bhut Jolokia has some different isomers of capsaicin with differing effects from "standard" pepper sprays? I'd have looked it up on wikipedia but they're down at the moment.
What you describe is a matched case-control study. There are better methods such as double-blind randomized clinical trials. An intro to epidemiology course will teach you all of this. If the high and mighty physicist can think of an even better method than clinical trials, go ahead and state them.
As for MRI machines, they produce a lot of data, but they are just statistical associations. Just because a depressed patient's brain looks different on an MRI machine from a normal person's brain does not prove any causal relationship. Again, if the high-and-mighty physicist thinks they have a better answer, they are welcome to state them.
Slashdot Mirror
Fish bowls or glass vases placed next to windows can spontaneously start fires.
I was there at the opening of the Yodobashi Camera store, where they made a big fuss of how it was supposed to be the new wal-mart of Akiba. Like every other store in Tokyo with the kushidango architecture, it was small, cluttered, and overpriced; the escalators/elevators seemed to take up more floor space than the merchandise. And yes, I was taken to the smaller stores in the back streets, with their random assortments of wires, diodes, screws, and other junk. And the anime fetishist stores with their oh-so-precious original sketches. Some store, whatever it was called, had a TV series on DVD on discount, which I bought, but I was hoodwinked; it showed about 10 minutes of actual show, then spent the next hour interviewing the actress when the series ended. That stuff happens a lot, the yakuza own the copyrights to the show and release scam "collections". I was also taken to the Uniqlo store in ginza, which was "revolutionizing retailing" in Japan. It was about as big as an average convenience store, with merchandise that looked like it belonged at Salvation Army. But let's not forget the prominent ads for "U-15" web sites at the train station, advertising child pornography. After so many years of embarrassing open displays as such, they're finally wisening up over there in 2010 and Ishihara is actually campaigning against it. But yeah, I don't know why I bother talking to Japanophiles about this stuff; they just get violent and deny everything. It seems nobody wants to talk about what's really good for Japan, not the Japanese or the Japapnophiles.
I love how people assume I only went to the duty-free shops, or that I don't speak Japanese. I was born in Japan and it is my native language. I've been to shops in both the back streets and forward streets. I wasn't impressed with any of it. If some people see the point to spending $200 on a plastic bikini doll, $400 on some draft sketches of an obscure anime series, or $800 on a camera because the lens can move forward and backward like some unfulfilled manhood fantasy, then I suppose they stay in business. Oh I forgot, I guess I'm talking to the slashdot crowd here. Haha.
Having lived in Tokyo before, I've never understood what the fuss is about. Most stores in Akihabara are tiny, amateurish ratholes run by guys who have no idea what they are talking about, but act snobbish to cover for it. They sell obsolete software for hundreds of dollars, out of torn boxes in poor condition. Most of the stuff will only work on the Japanese electric grid, on Asia-encoded DVD players, or on computers with Windows Japan installed on it. Despite the sales clerks' insistence, it will have problems in the USA. And cameras, they will act like they never heard of a camera that costs less than $300. If I tell them I just want something simple, that doesn't have a million buttons and strange features on it, then they are deeply offended and just turn their back to me. It is the last place I would want to go to buy anything. Between Wal-mart or ordering off the internet, these kind of places serve no particular purpose anymore.
Ethics training will not prevent all terrorists. On the other hand, it can serve multiple purposes:
1. Train people to avoid trouble, reducing disgruntlement;
2. Get more out of their career and be happier;
3. Identify other sources of disgruntlement, which can lead to terrorism.
The terrorists who espouse whatever cause will often turn out to have a relatively mundane cause of disgruntlement. They had not been trained to deal with wrongs dealt to them, or how to avoid doing wrongs themselves. None of this is obvious from mere childhood morals.
There is more to ethics than just personal privacy. It is ingrained in everything we do. In the long run, good ethics lead to having more successful relationships with other people, and a happier life.
What you say is typical of engineering majors. However, in the health professions, I have received extensive ethical training, and continue to receive them. The complex dilemmas encountered by health professionals cannot be reasonably taught by mere "good parenting". Every action we take has ethical consequences which are not obvious; I continue to learn a lot from the seminars. Engineers believe they know how to think several steps ahead, but they receive no training in ethics and believe it's all just "parenting".
Having been in engineering majors before, I can testify that engineers receive little or no training in ethics. Antisocial attitudes are rife; they are trained to look down on other people, and think it's "funny" to install a virus on someone's computer or blow something up with a pipe bomb. I was a software engineer for 10 years, but I got fed up with these attitudes, so I moved into the health professions. I feel much happier here; it's all about caring for other people.
I'm on a new diabetes drug that has completely shut down my appetite -- I've lost 7 pounds in 7 days. I've lost weight so rapidly that I have new wrinkles on my fingertips, as if I've been in the bathtub too long. (I lowered the dose this morning and my appetite is back.)
Every science magazine since the 1950s has felt obliged to talk about the "blimp renaissance" once a year, along with a "promising prototype".
I'm still waiting for the news of a prankster somewhere that flies a large RC blimp with a picture of Osama on it.
I took a career aptitude test in the early 90s, and it told me my aptitudes were pretty much exactly in the center between various career fields. In a word, it was worthless.
Many people in the 90s were also eager to recommend "What Color Is Your Parachute?" They ask a lot of simplistic questions like "Are you a people person? yes or no." It was worthless also. I've met multiple college career counselors also, and none of them had the slightest clue what they were talking about.
Do any of these aptitude models take into account that interests shift over time? We are not insects that are hard-wired to do particular tasks. My career has taken me through various nooks and crannies ranging from radio station support staff, law enforcement, jet engine factories, to hospital transplant centers, and presently I am getting a PhD in a statistics.
I remember reading about microneedle patches all the time in the 1990s. It was vaporware.
Is this one of those projects like the X-prize, which keeps showing the same images year after year of rockets with bubble windows that will be commercially available "soon"?
Have you ever:
- tasted more than one sausage at the sample counter, but didn't buy any?
- sampled a grape at the supermarket?
- picked up a penny at the fountain?
- walked out of a coffee shop with a newspaper that you weren't sure was free?
- accidentally kept something in your shopping cart, but didn't bother to return it?
- borrowed the fire ax from downtown to chop down a tree in your yard?
- kept shopping carts in your garage?
- got a refund for your doctor's co-pay via medical supplies?
- wrote a check to the church for $10, and helped yourself to $9 in change from the collection plate?
- leafed through someone else's medical records at the hospital?
- decorated your college dorm room with a traffic sign?
- stowed extra rolls of toilet paper into your backpack?
- palmed the salt & pepper shakers at the restaurant?
- re-purposed the movie theater exit sign into a night light for your room?
- made off with the weights from the gym?
- packed the hotel towels?
- reached down for a box of candy, out of sight from the cashier?
- lifted a jacket off of a sleeping person in the library, because it looked so heavy on their back?
- rummaged through a stranger's purse?
- helped yourself to the donation can for cancer kids, so you can buy some nyquil?
- sampled girl scout cookies, while pocketing the money can?
- liberated a bird from the pet shop?
- packed a stranger's puppy into your gym bag?
- decided your in-law's jewelry looks better on your fingers?
- filled your tank with somebody else's credit card, while they went inside?
- scolded a kid at the park that they shouldn't own a cell phone, so you taught them a lesson?
- told a skateboarder you'll show them a really cool trick, and rode away?
- decided to help the local construction site by steering their crane on sunday?
- helped the local fire department by driving their truck somewhere else?
- helped your new neighbor by making their moving truck disappear?
- made off with the manhole lid, and watched cars get destroyed?
No, don't tell kids to invent useless products, sell lemonade, or deliver newspapers. Teach kids to become health inspectors who demand $10,000 fines from lemonade stands. Teach them to go door to door asking to sign petitions to stop delivery of unwanted "free" newspapers, to save the trees. If they must sell something, teach them to sell bottles of "eco" tap water for $10 each that somehow saves a starving child in Africa. Put a pink ribbon on a $1 box of cookies and sell them for $10, because it will save cancer victims. Have your vacation paid for by asking $1 for every mile you ride on your bicycle, because this goes to a good cause.
Will we see more 5th graders "inventing" baking soda volcanoes, solar-powered flashlights, pedal-powered generators, lemon-powered batteries? But of course, we shouldn't forget the cardboard catapults or the salt crystal "jewelry". No doubt, these will save the world some day.
You'll find the same sort of "panel consensus" by scientists in the 1970s who were absolutely sure that billions of people will starve to death by the year 2000, because the world doesn't produce enough food and everybody will be malnourished.
The closer I get to obtaining my PhD, the more I'm learning that science is a group-think exercise where you had better agree with what others think, or else.
A lot of papers were published in the 1990s claiming that endocrine disruptors such as BPA will cause children to have delayed onset of puberty. Since the onset of puberty has become earlier if anything, this seems to be in the same class of research as the "harm" of fluoridated water, power line radio waves, or dental amalgam mercury.
Speaking in terms of survival analysis:
The reported overall survival probability for an Ebola patient is supposedly 10%. But how many people/animals naturally have an immunity to Ebola, therefore they got infected but had no symptoms, therefore they never knew it? Then the marginal probability of surviving an Ebola infection may be greater than 10%.
Also, the survival probability changes over time depending on how long they were infected. An Ebola patient who has already survived, say, 5 days is more likely to survive than an Ebola patient who has survived 1 day so far.
The drug's effectiveness is likely to differ depending on how long after the infection it was administered. Also, what is the drug's lethality on uninfected patients?
Do survival durations for uninfected/infected individuals follow a predictable distribution, such as an exponential, Weibull, or log-normal distribution? Animal researchers typically assume an underlying parametric distribution, through which they can claim higher power, greater significance. But in human studies, the semiparametric Cox model (assuming a nonparametric distribution) is the standard; since this has less power, that is one reason studies often fail in human models.
Many factors to consider.
Do scientists believe their own theories? Scientists disagree about everything, down to the basic principles of their specialty. I'm in graduate school getting my PhD. I've attended seminars, been in luncheons with "world-class scientists". I've witnessed them making up whatever theories they want, which fits in with their political/religious/ethnic beliefs. I was in a seminar the other day by a geneticist with a world-class reputation, who exposed a lot of seaminess in DNA sequencing technology, held to be the gospel truth in our society today. In reality, samples are easily contaminated by handling; a "sample" of caveman DNA was shown to be contaminated just by the presence of people in the same room, using standard laboratory procedures. Then she went right on to claim that modern polar bears are descended from Irish bears, and it was pretty clear she was just cheerleading her ethnic background.
Are chimps that similar to humans? Scientists have measured only mitochondrial DNA before to claim "99.9% similarity" between organisms, and that because this is DNA, it is indisputable truth. But then, if we apply the same standard to Y chromosomes, then chimps and humans are only about 50-66% similar, depending on the metric used.
http://www.wi.mit.edu/news/archives/2010/dp_0113.html
And as MIT says, the chimpanzee is only the second Y chromosome to be comprehensively analyzed. Are you going to say for sure that orangutans are less related?
"HIV is relatively new. What is old are precursor viruses such as SIV (the version for apes) and FIV (the version for cats)."
But then, SIV and FIV were discovered only after HIV. I remember back then when scientists used to say that only primates can catch AIDS.
30 to 40 years ago, the tree of evolution was missing an entire kingdom of archaea. When I took high school biology, they told us that archaea are "extremely rare bacteria" that only live in hot springs. We now know this is not true; archaea are ubiquitous, only scientists didn't know where to look. Biology teachers like to show microscope pictures as "proof" of whatever theory they teach, though it's interesting they spent hundreds of years unable to find archaea that live all over the place.
We are no longer descended from sponges, according to this article -- it's the opposite of what they taught us.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090402124316.htm
They still claim that humans descended from African apes. However, humans share more DNA similarity to Asian orangutans.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090618084304.htm
And when I was in high school, they claimed that HIV was a new mutant virus that appeared in Africa in the 1950s or 60s. However, we now know that HIV has been around as long as mammals have walked the Earth.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090927145354.htm
So yes, there seem to be giant gaps in our understanding of life's origins. It will be interesting to see how different the theory of evolution will be in the future; maybe by then, "evolution" will be a dirty word and scientific zealots will demand that nobody mention it.
"However, we do know that the vast majority of similarities in DNA are due to evolutionary relationships because the genetic sequences when one graphs them by how different they are from each other form a tree, exactly as evolution would expect."
Actually, no. DNA homology has re-drawn the "evolution tree" considerably, as species that were thought to be related turned out not to be, while other "unrelated" species turned out to be related. After re-drawing the tree, scientists now say this "proves" that DNA homologies are due to evolutionary relationships. Sounds like circular logic to me.
Not so long ago, transposons (jumping genes) were thought to happen only in "lower" animals, not in humans. We now know that transposons are common in humans. They also said the same of copy number variations, or of DNA letters different from A/C/G/T.
The current dogma of genetics says that DNA homology between species is caused solely by evolutionary relationships. How long before we realize that this isn't true either?
I'm not an evolution denialist, but I do think the current scientific understanding of evolution has a religious zeal.
Could they mean that Bhut Jolokia has some different isomers of capsaicin with differing effects from "standard" pepper sprays? I'd have looked it up on wikipedia but they're down at the moment.
What you describe is a matched case-control study. There are better methods such as double-blind randomized clinical trials. An intro to epidemiology course will teach you all of this. If the high and mighty physicist can think of an even better method than clinical trials, go ahead and state them.
As for MRI machines, they produce a lot of data, but they are just statistical associations. Just because a depressed patient's brain looks different on an MRI machine from a normal person's brain does not prove any causal relationship. Again, if the high-and-mighty physicist thinks they have a better answer, they are welcome to state them.