I embrace Christianity as a moral system. I am a Christian in this sense. I'm not here to promote intelligent design or to oppose the theory of evolution as a whole, as the slashdot crowd may wish to label me. My position is that any number of theories can be cooked up about evolution, cosmology, etc., and one can find any amount of data to support their theory. Every theory I've come across relies on a faith in untestable or non-falsifiable postulates. Our physical reality is defined by what we look for; there are any number of legitimate theories based on data that isn't available yet, because we didn't look in the right places, or ask the right questions.
I did not dispute the properties of isotopes themselves. When studied in the laboratory, isotopes appear to have predictable properties of exponential decay. (Though, I would add that the more stable isotopes which last for millions of years can only be assumed on faith to have the same properties of exponential decay as more short-lived isotopes. Could there be emergent properties that make them deviate from predictions? We know from the world of survival analysis that longer-lived entities often do deviate; the "proportional hazards" model is inappropriate.)
What I question, as you have, are the untestable postulates involving mixtures of isotopes in the crust. The only way to test this is to make hundreds of planets and wait millions of years. We don't have the technology to do so, so we only have postulates that appear logical. As we know, plenty of ideas sound logically elegant, but fail to work in the real world.
On the other hand, plenty of very smart physicists, mathematicians, etc. have approached medicine spouting much the same rhetoric as you. They very quickly became embarassed when they tried to apply their fanciful theories to medicine. If you have a better idea on how to tell apart correlation from causation in a medical context, let them know.
You think I'm full of it? Wait till you hear professors at seminars, making up whatever theories they like. I've witnessed professors from household-name schools acting like this.
I used to be a devout atheist. But the more I've learned about science, the more I've learned that it is a giant flimsy pile of assumptions. In reality, science works just like a religion, with all the same dogma, persecution of questions it doesn't like. We have a theory of evolution that is being overturned every week, whenever someone finds an old bone in the "wrong" place. We have a geology built on a faith in isotopes that are supposedly trapped in mud for millions of years, an untestable postulate. We have a public health system whose job is to tell people what to do, though its recommendations get reversed every few years. Everybody should use hand sanitizers all the time, oh wait it has no effect. Table salt should be outlawed, oh wait salt doesn't cause any harm. Everybody over age 40 should take heart drugs every day, whether they have problems or not -- oh wait, heart pills turn out to have no effect on the risk of heart disease after all. Everybody should get colonoscopies, oh wait it causes more problems than it solves. Breast cancer screening, same story. Everybody should have red ribbons on their car antennas to show support for AIDS victims -- even though diabetes kills far more people and its effects are just as lethal. So, diabetes victims deserve no sympathy because it is a disease of sloth -- though the same could be said of AIDS. About 14% of Americans over age 30 have diabetes, according to this:
That sounds a lot higher than the 0.7% prevalence of AIDS in America. Both are incurable but treatable diseases. Incidentally, there is fairly good evidence that some types of diabetes are caused by viruses such as Coxsackie B4 virus. But even if it is proven conclusively, I have a feeling it won't produce the same headlines as the discovery of the HIV virus.
I'm getting my PhD in a statistical genetics program.
The quality of "newly discovered genes" in the literature is very, very poor. Any scientific "discovery" should be replicated by other researchers, but that is not being done. Negative results rarely get published. Since we have tens of thousands of genes, one can find any number of genes that have a "significant association" with a given condition.
In reality, many diseases are known to have multiple origins. The same disease could be caused by entirely different genes in different people. And that's assuming it is a genetic condition, as opposed to other causes. Researchers have spent decades looking for genes that cause diabetes, but there is increasing evidence that diabetes is really caused by viral infections. In particular, type I diabetes was assumed to be genetic, but there is a fairly large amount of evidence that it is caused by viruses such as Coxsackie B4. The incidence of type 1 diabetes is increasing throughout the world, which cannot be explained by genetics.
To dispel a couple of other myths, genetic diseases are not always recessive. Many of them are dominant. Also, "bad" genes do not always get selected out of the gene pool; diseases that cause problems later in life, such as Alzheimer's, heart disease, Huntington's, happen after reproductive age and so there is no selection pressure.
How many issues of Popular Science predict that a renaissance in blimp transport will happen "soon"? Seriously, it seems like they have posted the same article every year for the past 70 years or so.
"If you call science a religion of materialism, you're clearly missing the point."
As far as I have heard, science experiments are performed on physical objects, then replicated by other laboratories before the theory is accepted further. This sounds like materialism to me.
Granted, one could argue that fields such as mathematics or cosmology do not perform physical experiments; they make pseudo-theistic conjectures on the universality of their results. The conjectures are debated by panels of authorities in the topic, then eventually accepted as "theorems", "theories", or "laws". The physical or mathematical laws are assumed to be the same everywhere in the universe, unless experimental data from the "lower" sciences prove otherwise, e.g. the Voyager spacecraft travelling faster than expected outside the solar system. Then scientists propose an "anti-gravity constant" and place their faith in the new "universal" result.
"It was never meant to denote that it did nothing, just that we hadn't discovered its function yet, so it got put aside for the moment."
Thusly, scientists have assumed a uniform rate of genetic drift from not knowing any better. Such an assumption underlies all of the DNA homology theories today. Whenever a uniform rate of change is assumed, it is logically equivalent to a linear extrapolation.
Additionally, it's quite possible for similar DNA sequences to arise by chance alone, with no kinship. Scientists today assume that such cases are extremely rare -- but why wouldn't they arise if two unrelated organisms face the same selection pressures? In the recent past, plenty of phenomena thought to be non-existent or rare in humans, e.g. transposons, have turned out to be common; we merely lack the tools to track them effectively.
I am no religious fanatic. I will continue to work in science. I accept that I will become a priest of yet another religion called "science"; it is no different from tasks that religious priests performed in the past, when they did work we would consider science, math, or botany. Our lives today are no less ruled by faith than in times past; we merely place the faith in a secular materialist view of the world. Today, we live in a world governed by materialist extremism. However, if the law of regression to the mean is any indication, then extreme values have only one direction in which they are left to move.
"There's long strings of junk DNA that does nothing at all - random leftover of mutations that didn't happen to affect our survival one way or the other. Because these don't affect physical traits, they aren't selected for or against and are subject to only one 'force', genetic drift. That's why they're fairly constant."
Yet, as we're discovering, "junk" DNA is really a misnomer. Every year, we discover more and more ways in which the supposedly inactive junk DNA actually perform important biological functions. It could also be that selection pressures for a given piece of DNA existed during certain time periods and not others; there is no reason to assume a uniform selection pressure (or lack of pressure) over time. The models in use today assume Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, which is never observed in the real world, but is somehow assumed to work over millions of years. The theories are non-testable, non-reproducible, and non-falsifiable. In short, it makes dogmatic assertions no better than religious texts.
Genetics today is obsessed with conserved DNA sequences as "proof" of evolutionary kinship. It is based on a faith that DNA mutates at a uniform rate over time. But why should we assume a uniform rate over time, when evolutionary theory says that genetic differentiation happens in leaps and bounds? DNA homology amounts to a linear extrapolation, when it is known that evolution takes curvy, twisted paths. I venture to guess that DNA homology will turn out to be about as reliable as phrenology. I'm getting my PhD in statistics, and I've taken several courses in genetics -- enough to know that all theories in genetics are wrong. Indeed, much of science is based on a giant leap of faith in linear regression; physicists, chemists, doctors, engineers, all use linear regression without questioning its assumptions. The assumptions implicit in linear regression are not justified by real world data when examined closely, but very few science papers go into this level of inquiry. I used to be an atheist, but I've come to the conclusion that science is just as irrational as Wahabbism. They say mathematics is the one infallible science, but numbers are just an idealization of reality; they fail to capture all the complexity. Science wants simple explanations, yet the world isn't simple; it is inherently an exercise in circular logic.
If you can think of a better way to treat cancer, feel free to propose a new treatment. It might take degrees in oncology, statistics, epidemiology, biochemistry, etc. before you know what you are talking about, though. Also, the treatment must have a reasonable cost; a billion-dollar treatment will not be practical for anyone.
These numbers don't mean anything unless we know how many procedures are conducted in total. It could be that the probability of a fatal complication, defined as (# of fatal complications) / (# of procedures) is quite low.
I took a course on clinical decision analysis last semester. Every intervention, even diagnostic ones, carry a risk. The risk needs to be weighed versus its benefit to determine its overall efficacy. If the patient is very ill and has a short life expectancy or very low quality of life, then even dangerous procedures become acceptable.
One can conduct analyses based on expected life expectancy, QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years), QOL (Quality of Life), or from a purely economic point of view. How much is a patient's life worth? Is a 5-year-old's life worth more than an 85-year-old's life? What about a 45-year-old? This can get quite philosophical. One could even conduct an analysis against a combination of outcomes, though how we choose to weigh the different outcomes is arbitrary.
Bayesian probabilities figure heavily into these analyses, and they can give quite counter-intuitive results. For example, if a test for AIDS is 99% "accurate" (in terms of sensitivity and specificity), it can still have a very high false positive rate (if AIDS is rare in the general population). In this sense, the AIDS test carries a toll of emotional devastation for the false positives. It can be a challenge to convince the general public, even your average physician, of the validity of a model. A good model will have conducted sensitivity analyses to allow for the possibility that a given procedure may have a higher (or lower) risk than expected.
There is no contradiction. Legally speaking (in my state), two physicians have to sign a form before a patient can be declared brain dead. However, organ procurement technicians will check the patient anyway before they recover organs. Nobody wants a scandal where a "dead" patient wakes up while having his heart removed.
In many hospitals, there is a buddy-buddy mentality where if Dr. A says he confirmed brain death, then Dr. B will just sign the form. To be fair to physicians, their priority is to save patients that can be saved, rather than nitpicking the detailed state of patients who will die in a few hours. They leave the "dirty" work to technicians who care.
Physicians are not God. I've also heard stories where an intern or resident panicked in the OR when things didn't go according to textbook descriptions. In such situations, if a more senior physician is not available, then experienced nurses will take over. They have done thousands of operations before, and know exactly what to do.
Not really related, but it is entirely possible for humans to be "alive" in a physical sense even after they are brain dead. As long as they are hooked up to respirators etc., they can be kept alive indefinitely. To date, no human being is ever known to have regained consciousness after brain death.
The _big_ catch here is that most physicians are not properly trained to test for brain death. Most physicians will just see a flat line on an EKG and declare the patient brain dead. I used to work at an organ transplant center, where there were technicians that went through a formal checklist to make sure the patient really is brain dead. It was not uncommon to find patients who did not meet the strict criteria. In the most dramatic example, a 3-yo boy was supposedly brain dead, and he was in the operating room, ready to have his organs removed. The technicians discovered that his pupils did respond to light, so they rushed him out of the OR. On the way back to his room, the boy opened his eyes and smiled. But then he went back into a coma and died 5 days later.
Another issue is that professors are unwilling to relocate to foreign countries where scientific activity is minimal. I can attest, as a PhD candidate, that published scientific papers only tell a fraction of everything that is going on. Even in the internet age, one still needs to be in physical proximity to strong departments to know what is really going on. As a result, foreign campuses only attract the tourist types who aren't serious about their academic careers.
Every year, the US media feels obliged to panic about some high-profile scientist that returns to China/India. In most cases, the same scientist will come back to the USA after 1-2 years, because they grew frustrated with the backwardness, lack of freedoms in their home country. These guys gave up promising jobs in the USA, so they have to go to some much less prestigious job in the US.
In the same vein, US universities like to loudly proclaim the opening of campuses in Asia, such as in Singapore, Dubai, or South Korea. Most of the campuses end up being shut down after about 3 years, because they couldn't get enough students, and the students they could get were of very low caliber. In the meanwhile, student tuition experiences huge hikes to pay for the millions of dollars to open new campuses, university administrators pat themselves on the back and give themselves huge bonuses, then when they shut the campuses down, they give themselves bonuses again for "cutting costs".
For all the talk of "cloud computing", are there publicly available data sets from Google (or other companies)? I'm a graduate student interested in data mining of health outcomes data. My biggest challenge remains the fact that HIPAA and other patient privacy concerns make it very difficult to obtain health outcomes data; it's still a 1980s world where data are granted through official channels after extensive paperwork, or as a favor from people who trust me.
I used to work at a hospital, and they let me sit in on one. What you miss is the yellow skin of corpses, and the fact that they still make noises from various orifices when you move the body parts.
The gall bladder really is green -- it's not an artifact of textbook coloring.
Everyone said I will get sick from watching a real autopsy, but it didn't feel any worse than watching a horror movie. I wore a mask, so didn't smell much.
With the recent torrential rains we've had, we do check the door before opening, since there is about a 50% chance of seeing a roach or yellowjacket outside the door. The other night, my relative's porch was overrun with palmettos, we couldn't count them all. Their roof awning is abuzz with the sounds of dozens of carpenter bees drilling holes. Every time I come back from my relative's house on top of a mountain at night, it turns into an odyssey of mysterious blobs of kudzu, and cat faces, coyote faces that flash in and out of peripheral vision. I've experienced spatial disorientation before, when I travelled to the arctic and faraway mountains looked close; you can experience them in Alabama with the kudzu blobs. Earlier in the summer, we went shooting in the woods and man, everyone was covered in ticks. The red clay soil was rock-hard, so I found an ant hill of soft ground to plant the target sign. The place turned into a geyser of black ants. Recently, we saw a white coyote the size of a fawn just walking down the street in broad daylight. They are supposed to be nocturnal and afraid of people.
I've been in downtown Birmingham after 5pm, when it turns into a ghost town. I had to stay there late once when my car broke down. Every car that drove by stared at me, marvelling at the sight of human life. There was an abandoned car showroom with a forest of tall trees growing indoors. When the tow truck took me away, I saw a pack of dogs trot into the building.
If the spread of Cogongrass means fewer bugs to annoy us, fewer trees to topple over and kill people, fewer birds who block vents with their nests, fewer deer to ruin cars, I don't think any locals would care. We have too much nature as it is. Alabama turns into a black river of roaches at night, a yellow fog of meat bees during the day, a green carpet of fallen leaves and trees during storms. Every shoe, dark corner in the house is inhabited by aggressive scorpions who come at us. Our walkway is a highway for the local population of leprosy-carrying armadillos. We keep our house very clean, and all food (including crackers) is immediately put in the refrigerator, but every morning, we wake up to a mass grave of dead beetles on the pesticide-treated carpet. Birds have figured out how to break into vent grills and build nests inside. We avoid the woods because the grass carries a black fog of disease-carrying ticks. If you think I'm making this up, you haven't lived here. We live in Alabama's biggest city, and in the countryside it's worse. Every rainstorm means the roads turn into an obstacle course of fallen trees, and it's extremely dangerous. A lot of cows, horses, boars, armadillos, dogs, deer, and other animals threaten drivers. Street lights that work are scarce, so at night everything becomes as dark as a cave. Driving is considered a man's job in the countryside.
Environmentalism is valued by people who live in big cities, for whom forests appear to be a scarce resource.
Slashdot Mirror
I embrace Christianity as a moral system. I am a Christian in this sense. I'm not here to promote intelligent design or to oppose the theory of evolution as a whole, as the slashdot crowd may wish to label me. My position is that any number of theories can be cooked up about evolution, cosmology, etc., and one can find any amount of data to support their theory. Every theory I've come across relies on a faith in untestable or non-falsifiable postulates. Our physical reality is defined by what we look for; there are any number of legitimate theories based on data that isn't available yet, because we didn't look in the right places, or ask the right questions.
I did not dispute the properties of isotopes themselves. When studied in the laboratory, isotopes appear to have predictable properties of exponential decay. (Though, I would add that the more stable isotopes which last for millions of years can only be assumed on faith to have the same properties of exponential decay as more short-lived isotopes. Could there be emergent properties that make them deviate from predictions? We know from the world of survival analysis that longer-lived entities often do deviate; the "proportional hazards" model is inappropriate.)
What I question, as you have, are the untestable postulates involving mixtures of isotopes in the crust. The only way to test this is to make hundreds of planets and wait millions of years. We don't have the technology to do so, so we only have postulates that appear logical. As we know, plenty of ideas sound logically elegant, but fail to work in the real world.
How do you prove that isotopes stay in the same place in the mud for millions of years?
On the other hand, plenty of very smart physicists, mathematicians, etc. have approached medicine spouting much the same rhetoric as you. They very quickly became embarassed when they tried to apply their fanciful theories to medicine. If you have a better idea on how to tell apart correlation from causation in a medical context, let them know.
You think I'm full of it? Wait till you hear professors at seminars, making up whatever theories they like. I've witnessed professors from household-name schools acting like this.
I used to be a devout atheist. But the more I've learned about science, the more I've learned that it is a giant flimsy pile of assumptions. In reality, science works just like a religion, with all the same dogma, persecution of questions it doesn't like. We have a theory of evolution that is being overturned every week, whenever someone finds an old bone in the "wrong" place. We have a geology built on a faith in isotopes that are supposedly trapped in mud for millions of years, an untestable postulate. We have a public health system whose job is to tell people what to do, though its recommendations get reversed every few years. Everybody should use hand sanitizers all the time, oh wait it has no effect. Table salt should be outlawed, oh wait salt doesn't cause any harm. Everybody over age 40 should take heart drugs every day, whether they have problems or not -- oh wait, heart pills turn out to have no effect on the risk of heart disease after all. Everybody should get colonoscopies, oh wait it causes more problems than it solves. Breast cancer screening, same story. Everybody should have red ribbons on their car antennas to show support for AIDS victims -- even though diabetes kills far more people and its effects are just as lethal. So, diabetes victims deserve no sympathy because it is a disease of sloth -- though the same could be said of AIDS. About 14% of Americans over age 30 have diabetes, according to this:
http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/7/1/16
That sounds a lot higher than the 0.7% prevalence of AIDS in America. Both are incurable but treatable diseases. Incidentally, there is fairly good evidence that some types of diabetes are caused by viruses such as Coxsackie B4 virus. But even if it is proven conclusively, I have a feeling it won't produce the same headlines as the discovery of the HIV virus.
I'm getting my PhD in a statistical genetics program.
The quality of "newly discovered genes" in the literature is very, very poor. Any scientific "discovery" should be replicated by other researchers, but that is not being done. Negative results rarely get published. Since we have tens of thousands of genes, one can find any number of genes that have a "significant association" with a given condition.
In reality, many diseases are known to have multiple origins. The same disease could be caused by entirely different genes in different people. And that's assuming it is a genetic condition, as opposed to other causes. Researchers have spent decades looking for genes that cause diabetes, but there is increasing evidence that diabetes is really caused by viral infections. In particular, type I diabetes was assumed to be genetic, but there is a fairly large amount of evidence that it is caused by viruses such as Coxsackie B4. The incidence of type 1 diabetes is increasing throughout the world, which cannot be explained by genetics.
To dispel a couple of other myths, genetic diseases are not always recessive. Many of them are dominant. Also, "bad" genes do not always get selected out of the gene pool; diseases that cause problems later in life, such as Alzheimer's, heart disease, Huntington's, happen after reproductive age and so there is no selection pressure.
How many issues of Popular Science predict that a renaissance in blimp transport will happen "soon"? Seriously, it seems like they have posted the same article every year for the past 70 years or so.
I've been reading headlines for the past 20 years that claim "breakthroughs" in all-photonic computing. Where are the all-photonic routers?
"If you call science a religion of materialism, you're clearly missing the point."
As far as I have heard, science experiments are performed on physical objects, then replicated by other laboratories before the theory is accepted further. This sounds like materialism to me.
Granted, one could argue that fields such as mathematics or cosmology do not perform physical experiments; they make pseudo-theistic conjectures on the universality of their results. The conjectures are debated by panels of authorities in the topic, then eventually accepted as "theorems", "theories", or "laws". The physical or mathematical laws are assumed to be the same everywhere in the universe, unless experimental data from the "lower" sciences prove otherwise, e.g. the Voyager spacecraft travelling faster than expected outside the solar system. Then scientists propose an "anti-gravity constant" and place their faith in the new "universal" result.
"It was never meant to denote that it did nothing, just that we hadn't discovered its function yet, so it got put aside for the moment."
Thusly, scientists have assumed a uniform rate of genetic drift from not knowing any better. Such an assumption underlies all of the DNA homology theories today. Whenever a uniform rate of change is assumed, it is logically equivalent to a linear extrapolation.
Additionally, it's quite possible for similar DNA sequences to arise by chance alone, with no kinship. Scientists today assume that such cases are extremely rare -- but why wouldn't they arise if two unrelated organisms face the same selection pressures? In the recent past, plenty of phenomena thought to be non-existent or rare in humans, e.g. transposons, have turned out to be common; we merely lack the tools to track them effectively.
I am no religious fanatic. I will continue to work in science. I accept that I will become a priest of yet another religion called "science"; it is no different from tasks that religious priests performed in the past, when they did work we would consider science, math, or botany. Our lives today are no less ruled by faith than in times past; we merely place the faith in a secular materialist view of the world. Today, we live in a world governed by materialist extremism. However, if the law of regression to the mean is any indication, then extreme values have only one direction in which they are left to move.
"There's long strings of junk DNA that does nothing at all - random leftover of mutations that didn't happen to affect our survival one way or the other. Because these don't affect physical traits, they aren't selected for or against and are subject to only one 'force', genetic drift. That's why they're fairly constant."
Yet, as we're discovering, "junk" DNA is really a misnomer. Every year, we discover more and more ways in which the supposedly inactive junk DNA actually perform important biological functions. It could also be that selection pressures for a given piece of DNA existed during certain time periods and not others; there is no reason to assume a uniform selection pressure (or lack of pressure) over time. The models in use today assume Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, which is never observed in the real world, but is somehow assumed to work over millions of years. The theories are non-testable, non-reproducible, and non-falsifiable. In short, it makes dogmatic assertions no better than religious texts.
Genetics today is obsessed with conserved DNA sequences as "proof" of evolutionary kinship. It is based on a faith that DNA mutates at a uniform rate over time. But why should we assume a uniform rate over time, when evolutionary theory says that genetic differentiation happens in leaps and bounds? DNA homology amounts to a linear extrapolation, when it is known that evolution takes curvy, twisted paths. I venture to guess that DNA homology will turn out to be about as reliable as phrenology. I'm getting my PhD in statistics, and I've taken several courses in genetics -- enough to know that all theories in genetics are wrong. Indeed, much of science is based on a giant leap of faith in linear regression; physicists, chemists, doctors, engineers, all use linear regression without questioning its assumptions. The assumptions implicit in linear regression are not justified by real world data when examined closely, but very few science papers go into this level of inquiry. I used to be an atheist, but I've come to the conclusion that science is just as irrational as Wahabbism. They say mathematics is the one infallible science, but numbers are just an idealization of reality; they fail to capture all the complexity. Science wants simple explanations, yet the world isn't simple; it is inherently an exercise in circular logic.
If you can think of a better way to treat cancer, feel free to propose a new treatment. It might take degrees in oncology, statistics, epidemiology, biochemistry, etc. before you know what you are talking about, though. Also, the treatment must have a reasonable cost; a billion-dollar treatment will not be practical for anyone.
These numbers don't mean anything unless we know how many procedures are conducted in total. It could be that the probability of a fatal complication, defined as (# of fatal complications) / (# of procedures) is quite low.
I took a course on clinical decision analysis last semester. Every intervention, even diagnostic ones, carry a risk. The risk needs to be weighed versus its benefit to determine its overall efficacy. If the patient is very ill and has a short life expectancy or very low quality of life, then even dangerous procedures become acceptable.
One can conduct analyses based on expected life expectancy, QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years), QOL (Quality of Life), or from a purely economic point of view. How much is a patient's life worth? Is a 5-year-old's life worth more than an 85-year-old's life? What about a 45-year-old? This can get quite philosophical. One could even conduct an analysis against a combination of outcomes, though how we choose to weigh the different outcomes is arbitrary.
Bayesian probabilities figure heavily into these analyses, and they can give quite counter-intuitive results. For example, if a test for AIDS is 99% "accurate" (in terms of sensitivity and specificity), it can still have a very high false positive rate (if AIDS is rare in the general population). In this sense, the AIDS test carries a toll of emotional devastation for the false positives. It can be a challenge to convince the general public, even your average physician, of the validity of a model. A good model will have conducted sensitivity analyses to allow for the possibility that a given procedure may have a higher (or lower) risk than expected.
There is no contradiction. Legally speaking (in my state), two physicians have to sign a form before a patient can be declared brain dead. However, organ procurement technicians will check the patient anyway before they recover organs. Nobody wants a scandal where a "dead" patient wakes up while having his heart removed.
In many hospitals, there is a buddy-buddy mentality where if Dr. A says he confirmed brain death, then Dr. B will just sign the form. To be fair to physicians, their priority is to save patients that can be saved, rather than nitpicking the detailed state of patients who will die in a few hours. They leave the "dirty" work to technicians who care.
Physicians are not God. I've also heard stories where an intern or resident panicked in the OR when things didn't go according to textbook descriptions. In such situations, if a more senior physician is not available, then experienced nurses will take over. They have done thousands of operations before, and know exactly what to do.
Not really related, but it is entirely possible for humans to be "alive" in a physical sense even after they are brain dead. As long as they are hooked up to respirators etc., they can be kept alive indefinitely. To date, no human being is ever known to have regained consciousness after brain death.
The _big_ catch here is that most physicians are not properly trained to test for brain death. Most physicians will just see a flat line on an EKG and declare the patient brain dead. I used to work at an organ transplant center, where there were technicians that went through a formal checklist to make sure the patient really is brain dead. It was not uncommon to find patients who did not meet the strict criteria. In the most dramatic example, a 3-yo boy was supposedly brain dead, and he was in the operating room, ready to have his organs removed. The technicians discovered that his pupils did respond to light, so they rushed him out of the OR. On the way back to his room, the boy opened his eyes and smiled. But then he went back into a coma and died 5 days later.
Needless to say, the boy's parents were furious.
Thanks, that is one issue I hadn't heard about.
Another issue is that professors are unwilling to relocate to foreign countries where scientific activity is minimal. I can attest, as a PhD candidate, that published scientific papers only tell a fraction of everything that is going on. Even in the internet age, one still needs to be in physical proximity to strong departments to know what is really going on. As a result, foreign campuses only attract the tourist types who aren't serious about their academic careers.
Every year, the US media feels obliged to panic about some high-profile scientist that returns to China/India. In most cases, the same scientist will come back to the USA after 1-2 years, because they grew frustrated with the backwardness, lack of freedoms in their home country. These guys gave up promising jobs in the USA, so they have to go to some much less prestigious job in the US.
Don't believe me? Here's one example. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/business/global/28return.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
In the same vein, US universities like to loudly proclaim the opening of campuses in Asia, such as in Singapore, Dubai, or South Korea. Most of the campuses end up being shut down after about 3 years, because they couldn't get enough students, and the students they could get were of very low caliber. In the meanwhile, student tuition experiences huge hikes to pay for the millions of dollars to open new campuses, university administrators pat themselves on the back and give themselves huge bonuses, then when they shut the campuses down, they give themselves bonuses again for "cutting costs".
For all the talk of "cloud computing", are there publicly available data sets from Google (or other companies)? I'm a graduate student interested in data mining of health outcomes data. My biggest challenge remains the fact that HIPAA and other patient privacy concerns make it very difficult to obtain health outcomes data; it's still a 1980s world where data are granted through official channels after extensive paperwork, or as a favor from people who trust me.
I used to work at a hospital, and they let me sit in on one. What you miss is the yellow skin of corpses, and the fact that they still make noises from various orifices when you move the body parts.
The gall bladder really is green -- it's not an artifact of textbook coloring.
Everyone said I will get sick from watching a real autopsy, but it didn't feel any worse than watching a horror movie. I wore a mask, so didn't smell much.
http://centripetalnotion.com/2006/09/04/15:57:58/
http://www.jjanthony.com/kudzu/houses.html
http://www.joe-ks.com/archives_jan2009/TailgateCoyote.htm
http://www.aces.edu/department/extcomm/npa/newsline/archives/002890.php
http://www.northalabamamushroomsociety.org/
With the recent torrential rains we've had, we do check the door before opening, since there is about a 50% chance of seeing a roach or yellowjacket outside the door. The other night, my relative's porch was overrun with palmettos, we couldn't count them all. Their roof awning is abuzz with the sounds of dozens of carpenter bees drilling holes. Every time I come back from my relative's house on top of a mountain at night, it turns into an odyssey of mysterious blobs of kudzu, and cat faces, coyote faces that flash in and out of peripheral vision. I've experienced spatial disorientation before, when I travelled to the arctic and faraway mountains looked close; you can experience them in Alabama with the kudzu blobs. Earlier in the summer, we went shooting in the woods and man, everyone was covered in ticks. The red clay soil was rock-hard, so I found an ant hill of soft ground to plant the target sign. The place turned into a geyser of black ants. Recently, we saw a white coyote the size of a fawn just walking down the street in broad daylight. They are supposed to be nocturnal and afraid of people.
I've been in downtown Birmingham after 5pm, when it turns into a ghost town. I had to stay there late once when my car broke down. Every car that drove by stared at me, marvelling at the sight of human life. There was an abandoned car showroom with a forest of tall trees growing indoors. When the tow truck took me away, I saw a pack of dogs trot into the building.
If the spread of Cogongrass means fewer bugs to annoy us, fewer trees to topple over and kill people, fewer birds who block vents with their nests, fewer deer to ruin cars, I don't think any locals would care. We have too much nature as it is. Alabama turns into a black river of roaches at night, a yellow fog of meat bees during the day, a green carpet of fallen leaves and trees during storms. Every shoe, dark corner in the house is inhabited by aggressive scorpions who come at us. Our walkway is a highway for the local population of leprosy-carrying armadillos. We keep our house very clean, and all food (including crackers) is immediately put in the refrigerator, but every morning, we wake up to a mass grave of dead beetles on the pesticide-treated carpet. Birds have figured out how to break into vent grills and build nests inside. We avoid the woods because the grass carries a black fog of disease-carrying ticks. If you think I'm making this up, you haven't lived here. We live in Alabama's biggest city, and in the countryside it's worse. Every rainstorm means the roads turn into an obstacle course of fallen trees, and it's extremely dangerous. A lot of cows, horses, boars, armadillos, dogs, deer, and other animals threaten drivers. Street lights that work are scarce, so at night everything becomes as dark as a cave. Driving is considered a man's job in the countryside.
Environmentalism is valued by people who live in big cities, for whom forests appear to be a scarce resource.
That would actually be .999/(.999 + 9.99) = 9%.