A lot of people seem to misunderstand significants and clinical trials. Study power, or beta, is the ability to detect a difference between the control and study group of a certain magnitude and with a certain alpha level. Alpha is the probability of a false positive study result, and is typically set to under 5% Beta is the probability of not having a false negative result, and typically set to 80% (i.e. chance that you'll find a difference if it truly exists). For this study the difference is fairly obvious (can they see or not), so the number of participants needed isn't as great as if you were trying to discern a 1 torr difference in systolic blood pressure.
Clinical trials have many phases. First, there are pre-clinical studies done in the research lab with cell cultures and animals. Next, they may be a Phase 0 trial with very low sample sizes where extremely low doses are tested in humans to determine if the drug behaves the same way as it does in animals. Phase 1 is required step with a handful of healthy volunteers and it simply checks for safety. Phase 2 is slightly larger and checks for efficacy in patients with the disease in question. Phase 3 is much larger, and checks to see if the new treatment is better or worse than the current ones, and checks for less obvious side effects. After completion of these steps, a new treatment can be marketed (Phase 4), where it is monitored for very rare side effects (e.g. a 1/20,000 side effect might not show up in a Phase 3 trial with 5,000 subjects).
For a new drug these steps take about 10 years and a billion dollars. Life-saving treatments, like cancer drugs, can be put through a little bit faster. Other studies, like this one, are handled a bit differently. The major side effect was probably expected to be blindness. So you wouldn't want to risk that in a healthy person, but in someone who's already blind it's much safer ([Insert stupid pun about double blinded study participants]). You're still dealing with a virus, so that's why this is mostly testing for safety in a very small sample group. The fact that it's also showing an effect is icing on the cake. (Researchers like to test for both safety and efficacy in all phases, so the main difference is sample size, where it's small, then medium, then large.)
This approach was well and good back when computers were rare, mysterious items that most people equated to magic. Nowadays, most people carry two or more on their person at all times and a good chunk of the population uses them for hours-on-end at their job.
Not having a normal car fly isn't "getting bogged down in the real life technicalities", it's setting the story in a realistic world. OTOH, crappy stories seem to be a dime-a-dozen anymore, with the plot resolved almost instantly by breaking the established rules of the world in which the story is told. Apparently it's quite difficult for modern story-tellers to come up with a non-predictable ending without making the characters do the impossible.
They'll just en-sheath it in a metal coat that won't let you bend it beyond the recommendations. This coat will make the cable about 10 - 100 times more expensive. $49.99 seems to be what customers will pay, so they'll target that price point (it might be up to $75, I haven't looked at Best Buy's USB cables in the printer section lately). A lot of people still believe the "you get what you pay for" fallacy, so they'll think a $50 cable is spectacular. Speaking of which, Monster will come out with an EM-shielded, oxygen-free, gold plated version for about three times as much.
I've wondered why we can't meet computers half-way. Just design a constructed language that avoids the unsolvable problems. If operating computers by speech is truly better then learning the language would be akin to learning to type.
OTOH, if it's an attempt to simplify computing for those who don't wish to learn, well, that's an impossible task. The problem lies in the fact that such people don't give explicit commands, and even humans take quite a bit of intuition to figure out what they're implying.
I see no persecution of scientists. I see persecution of political figures (unjustly of course) that happened to be scientists. You can't make political claims then retreat to being a scientist when being criticized for them. Science is neutral, this climate researcher took a side, and in doing so opened himself up to attack.
In other words, doing a study on climate in general and having results consistent with global warming is pure science. Doing a study designed to show that global warming is the result of somebody's actions is both science and politics. Calling for change due to the results of a study is pure politics.
IMHO climate researchers would do better to concentrate on research, ignore political causes when designing studies, and not take a side when it comes to what they're researching. Let the politicians worry about what we should do rather than have a scientist become an amateur politician championing what boils down to economics. OTOH, politics funds science so I doubt it's easy to find a grant unless you align yourself with one side or the other. I'd imagine almost all of the funds for climate research have been diverted into AGW or into refuting it.
As is, the all-natural substance is perfect for medical procedures, because it's made of water, poses no harm to people, and is perfect for mending tissue.
Seriously?
Basically everything biological is mostly water, but not everything biological is harmless
"All-natural", well obviously it's safe then. It's not like there's any substance in nature the least bit dangerous.
Icicles are essentially 100% water, yet they kill people all the time. Realistically, any solid could cause an embolism which can easily cause a PE, MI, or stroke (all very bad things).
It takes a single immunogenic or thrombogenic ingredient or combination of ingredients to make this substance useless for medical procedures. It turns out, our body is quite good at attacking stuff that doesn't belong there, so very few substances can be used for such purposes.
It seems to me this isn't for when you really have a choice. I'd expect it's more for people in Antarctica, or the ISS, or who are about to die in like 15 minutes without a highly specialized surgery in a rural/field hospital.
There are plenty of land birds that don't really use their front legs, nor do kangaroos (outside of boxing), but I suppose the poster-boy for that would be the Tyrannosaur. Heck, even some 6-legged cockroaches run on 2 if they want to move at maximum speed. Humans, OTOH, are pretty much adapted for endurance hunting. We might not be fast, but we can run-down anything on land. The added maneuverability probably helped evade faster animals (or we killed and ate them first, the human hand is a powerful weapon). Plus, if we fall in a hole we can step up a lot farther since we don't need three legs on the ground for stability.
I'm glad my teacher didn't agree with that assessment! It's more like the trait gave a selective advantage that caused animals that had it to reproduce more, on average, than those without the trait. Or, mathematically, S is slightly less for bipedals than quadrupedals.
I suppose the first generations that began the journey to being bipedal only needed to reproduce enough to give rise to a better bipedal, but it's just as likely that even gimpy bipedalism was an advantage. That's even assuming it was a step-wise transition, a jump wouldn't suffer that drawback.
Either way, being bipedal is an advantage over any invading traits, or it wouldn't be an evolutionarily stable strategy.
There are advantages to being bipedal, hence why humans and birds are. OTOH, we're a very long way from robots being comparable to animals in terms of freedom of movement, so a lot of those advantages are lost. But, if we solve a few problems the relevant advantages would be weight (2 vs 4 legs), efficiency (wheels are best, but humans are the most efficient long distance runners), and the ability to step out of a hole.
I smell Microsoft making a money grab since HTC likely doesn't want to fight more than one major corporation in a patent war at the same time. So the royalties are probably a bit less than what said patent war would cost, and Microsoft gets a cut from the Android pie. It also hurts the iPhone slightly, which probably helps Microsoft.
I was just going off of Wikipedia since our current methods wouldn't detect an Earth-like planet if it were there. Plus, it's "close" enough that one can interact with it without waiting a generation or two to get the response, and a person could theoretically travel there without it being a one-way trip.
Increasing the number of pixels per inch on screens should improve this. Thankfully, GUIs are finally starting to adjust to DPI, and cellphones have created a market for higher PPI screens. Obviously people will prefer a 300 PPI printout over a 72 PPI screen. Doubly so if their eyesight is worsening. (Which is why it's a bit sad to see people decrease their lcd screen's resolution without knowing any better.)
First question: did this Apple employee have authorization to take that prototype out of the Apple facility?
I'd imagine Apple was testing to see if any problems pop up with real world type use.
And at what point did the Giz editor discover that the prototype was "stolen"?
Almost certainly before paying $5,000 for it. The rightful owner is the only reason this story is newsworthy.
If Apple wants to call the prototype a trade secret, then how can they reconcile that claim with the fact that the prototype was left in a public place where anyone could see and examine it?
If they'd dismantled it at the bar without actually stealing it I think they'd have a much better case.
IMHO, it's more likely someone stole an iPhone from the bar intending to wipe it and sell it. He realized that it wasn't just any iPhone, so he sold it for a much higher price to a media outlet. Gizmodo jumped at the chance to run the story before realizing that buying stolen goods is, in fact, illegal. Alternatively, they calculated that the value of breaking the story exceeded the legal ramifications. This doesn't quite fit with Gizmodo's description of events (e.g. quotes from the untraceable "Random Really Drunk Guy"), but does fit with the parts that can be verified.
The value of the prototype likely exceeds the value for your friend's car.
This theft probably has economic ramifications in the millions of dollars.
Everybody knows a crime was committed so people kinda expect the police to do something.
The culprit is known and isn't in hiding.
The victim is very well known.
The victim has a dedicated legal department.
Someone at the police station probably wants the media spotlight.
As far as Apple is concerned, I'd imagine they'd prefer to shift the story to "iPhone prototype stolen" from "Drunken Apple engineer loses iPhone prototype". That shifts the blame and doesn't have the implication that Apple engineers are drunkards. (Not that they are, but people subconsciously assume since all they know about the guy who lost the prototype is that he was drunk and he works for Apple.)
So, imagine that we detect the very first radio transmissions from a hypothetical rocky exoplanet around Alpha Centauri. That would mean we'd have roughly a 100 year technological advantage over the newly discovered intelligent species. What would we do?
IMHO, organizing an interstellar probe would be the first order of business. Next might be manned exploration, albeit both would easily take decades. We could probably send a nuke just as easily as a probe, but what would be the point? Starting an interstellar war would be an enormous waste of resources and effort. It'd be a lot easier to take a wait-and-see approach even if we could manage to send a significant military force.
Besides, chances are that we wouldn't be in direct competition for any resources. It'd be more like the discovery of Antarctica rather than North America.
Umm, even if Facebook didn't exist, why would you allow such pictures to be taken? If you're going to do something embarrassing, either ensure there's no proof, or don't do it around someone who doesn't keep secrets. It's not like Facebook is the only way the friend-of-a-friend potential boss is going to find out about your drunken debauchery. This is especially important if you live in a small town or are in a small profession.
This is my approach. I figure that having a facebook profile with my real name is basically a social necessity. I put up a list of my favorite books/movies/quotes, some publicly available contact information, and a few random "likes". I also allow myself to be tagged with community service events and similar. Anyone I come into contact with gets "friended", so my friend list isn't significantly more useful than a list of my networks, which mirrors my education and employment history.
My rationale is that I treat my Facebook page as a resume for both friends and prospective employers. I do keep enough information that someone can figure out who I am, and ignore friend request from people who I can't identify (e.g. a "private" profile with a useless baby picture and a common name). It is my suspicion that if I were investigating an applicant or someone I just met, I'd be a lot more suspicious of a very private or absent profile than one that reconfirmed what I already knew. It's human nature to assume that a secretive person has something interesting to hide, and even a casual use of Facebook would reinforce this assumption.
Yep, it's a real shame those surgeons don't spend more time fixing the world's political problems. I mean, why develop or pay for costly procedures, it's not cost effective at all! For the price of a single patient on NovoSeven we could save many thousands from malaria. Aborting a single high-risk pregnancy could save enough money to pay for proper prenatal care for dozens of low income women. Allowing a single child to die of leukemia rather than perform a costly bone marrow transplant could put every one of his classmates through college.
One benefit of being wealthy (as an individual or as a nation) is the ability to afford nice things. Since wealth isn't uniformly distributed, some people can afford such things while others cannot. As a wealthy nation we do fund quite a bit of foreign aid and public health initiatives in our own country. The cheap ideas that have a lot of measurable benefit are done unless there's a non economic/medical reason that prevents it. An example of which is that we spend more money on our own country's citizens than on another country's citizens due to a sense of responsibility and a respect for the other nation's autonomy. Another is that poor nations often have political issues that prevent cheap vaccines from being distributed.
My understanding is that this procedure was developed for burn patients and similar. They undergo hundreds of procedures and are still left looking quite abnormal. The social implications are tremendous, as are the alterations to their sense of identity. This procedure could dramatically improve their quality of life.
Full disclosure: my university has been working on this procedure for several years and have basically decided that they don't want to be the first. Apparently they're worried that the risk of rejection is too high, and if the face is rejected, what then? OTOH, I got all my info from one of the ethicists on the IRB, and not one of the core researchers. There are probably other reasons to not proceed despite allegedly being technically capable and ready for about 5 years now.
Using pre-1980 numbers for control won't work. Many forms of cancer have been increasing in prevalence over the years.
Advances in treatment can explain a lot of that. Prevalence is simply the number of people with the disease, so if people are living with it longer (i.e. not cured or killed) then the prevalence will increase despite the incidence staying the same.
The presence of so many confounding factors makes it nigh unto impossible to attribute any effect to cell phones without a real study.
IMHO, this is why such a study is meaningless (albeit I'm sure the reasons for conducting it are political). A person who doesn't use a cell phone is probably less sociable, which is known to have health effects (lowered risk of catching stuff, but overall negative IIRC). It could also be that poorer people are less likely to purchase plans with lots of minutes. Cell phones are too integrated in our lives to isolate as a variable for research.
A proper study (RCT) would do something like take prisioners with >15 year without parole sentences and randomize them into having a cell (no pun intended) that was flooded with EM radiation or not. But that's woefully unethical, would have less statistical power, and may not be extrapolatable to the general population.
I don't know about you, but I have a ~115 PPI screen, and if I can type on my laptop then I can easily distinguish individual pixels. Heck, I even see the two dead subpixels. So that's easily 400 PPI staring. The thing is, human eyes move, and the brain integrates that information. Apparently we can perceive at ~60 FPS, so that probably about ten images per saccade. Given what we can do with digital images, that multiplies the PPI by about 30 (assuming that mathematical image processing has caught up to natural selection). All-in-all, I'd say 10,000 PPI at two feet would be a very conservative estimate of when you'd max out the useful resolution for most people.
Another approach would be to realize you have ~200,000 cone cells/mm^3 in the fovea and the fovea is ~25 mm^3 per eye, so you have ~10 megapixel resolution for the central part of your vision alone. The fovea is responsible for a viewing field of ~4 in^2 at two feet. So that's a maximum resolution of 2,500,000 PPI before integration. I'm sure our visual system doesn't work anywhere near the maximum theoretical level (~100 megapixels per inch in central vision), but our current displays are six orders of magnitude below that.
The most damning thing is that 2/3 isn't terribly arbitrary of a number. It means that there are two yays for every nay. The person multiplying by.66 failed at both basic math and understanding the political rationale for the rule. (It's rather scary that a person can succeed in politics on charisma alone...)
It depends on what you view as exploration. If you care about mapping the universe, finding out relative concentrations of various elements, and building better probes, then unmanned exploration is the best choice. If you care more about more literally "traveling somewhere in search of discovery", developing human-oriented technology, or learning more about biology then manned exploration is better. Plus, of things that are intrinsically useless, which stimulates the human mind more, knowing the mineral composition of Neptune's moons, or being able to scale Olympus Mons?
I've never used the GMA 950, so you could be right. My current laptop has a GMA 4500 MHD, which is considerably better than my old laptop's midrange nVidia. There's also the GMA 4700 MHD, which should be better still. The 4500 series was a pretty big jump from the 3100, which was a big jump from its predecessor, which (from what I hear) was fairly bad.
I agree that drunk driving is probably more dangerous, but implanting something isn't exactly harmless. If the implant isn't completely sterile an infection could easily cause the person to lose a limb, or die. Heck, even if it were sterile a person might be allergic to something in it, go into anaphylactic shock and die. Or the chip could physically break and pieces might go to the brain/heart/lungs and cause a stroke, heart attack, or pulmonary embolism. Or perhaps the chip has a toxic metal inside that leaks out. Or it's magnetic so the person gets an MRI and the chip gets torn out... through the other side. There are dozens of ways this could maim/kill.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people seem to misunderstand significants and clinical trials. Study power, or beta, is the ability to detect a difference between the control and study group of a certain magnitude and with a certain alpha level. Alpha is the probability of a false positive study result, and is typically set to under 5% Beta is the probability of not having a false negative result, and typically set to 80% (i.e. chance that you'll find a difference if it truly exists). For this study the difference is fairly obvious (can they see or not), so the number of participants needed isn't as great as if you were trying to discern a 1 torr difference in systolic blood pressure.
Clinical trials have many phases. First, there are pre-clinical studies done in the research lab with cell cultures and animals. Next, they may be a Phase 0 trial with very low sample sizes where extremely low doses are tested in humans to determine if the drug behaves the same way as it does in animals. Phase 1 is required step with a handful of healthy volunteers and it simply checks for safety. Phase 2 is slightly larger and checks for efficacy in patients with the disease in question. Phase 3 is much larger, and checks to see if the new treatment is better or worse than the current ones, and checks for less obvious side effects. After completion of these steps, a new treatment can be marketed (Phase 4), where it is monitored for very rare side effects (e.g. a 1/20,000 side effect might not show up in a Phase 3 trial with 5,000 subjects).
For a new drug these steps take about 10 years and a billion dollars. Life-saving treatments, like cancer drugs, can be put through a little bit faster. Other studies, like this one, are handled a bit differently. The major side effect was probably expected to be blindness. So you wouldn't want to risk that in a healthy person, but in someone who's already blind it's much safer ([Insert stupid pun about double blinded study participants]). You're still dealing with a virus, so that's why this is mostly testing for safety in a very small sample group. The fact that it's also showing an effect is icing on the cake. (Researchers like to test for both safety and efficacy in all phases, so the main difference is sample size, where it's small, then medium, then large.)
This approach was well and good back when computers were rare, mysterious items that most people equated to magic. Nowadays, most people carry two or more on their person at all times and a good chunk of the population uses them for hours-on-end at their job.
Not having a normal car fly isn't "getting bogged down in the real life technicalities", it's setting the story in a realistic world. OTOH, crappy stories seem to be a dime-a-dozen anymore, with the plot resolved almost instantly by breaking the established rules of the world in which the story is told. Apparently it's quite difficult for modern story-tellers to come up with a non-predictable ending without making the characters do the impossible.
They'll just en-sheath it in a metal coat that won't let you bend it beyond the recommendations. This coat will make the cable about 10 - 100 times more expensive. $49.99 seems to be what customers will pay, so they'll target that price point (it might be up to $75, I haven't looked at Best Buy's USB cables in the printer section lately). A lot of people still believe the "you get what you pay for" fallacy, so they'll think a $50 cable is spectacular. Speaking of which, Monster will come out with an EM-shielded, oxygen-free, gold plated version for about three times as much.
I've wondered why we can't meet computers half-way. Just design a constructed language that avoids the unsolvable problems. If operating computers by speech is truly better then learning the language would be akin to learning to type.
OTOH, if it's an attempt to simplify computing for those who don't wish to learn, well, that's an impossible task. The problem lies in the fact that such people don't give explicit commands, and even humans take quite a bit of intuition to figure out what they're implying.
they would call you communist and wreck your career if you supported social reforms.
They took away Linus Pauling's passport
Linus Carl Pauling (February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, peace activist, author, and educator.
Oppenheimer's reputation never did recover after his security clearance was revoked
In his role as a political advisor, Oppenheimer made numerous enemies.
I see no persecution of scientists. I see persecution of political figures (unjustly of course) that happened to be scientists. You can't make political claims then retreat to being a scientist when being criticized for them. Science is neutral, this climate researcher took a side, and in doing so opened himself up to attack.
In other words, doing a study on climate in general and having results consistent with global warming is pure science. Doing a study designed to show that global warming is the result of somebody's actions is both science and politics. Calling for change due to the results of a study is pure politics.
IMHO climate researchers would do better to concentrate on research, ignore political causes when designing studies, and not take a side when it comes to what they're researching. Let the politicians worry about what we should do rather than have a scientist become an amateur politician championing what boils down to economics. OTOH, politics funds science so I doubt it's easy to find a grant unless you align yourself with one side or the other. I'd imagine almost all of the funds for climate research have been diverted into AGW or into refuting it.
As is, the all-natural substance is perfect for medical procedures, because it's made of water, poses no harm to people, and is perfect for mending tissue.
Seriously?
It seems to me this isn't for when you really have a choice. I'd expect it's more for people in Antarctica, or the ISS, or who are about to die in like 15 minutes without a highly specialized surgery in a rural/field hospital.
There are plenty of land birds that don't really use their front legs, nor do kangaroos (outside of boxing), but I suppose the poster-boy for that would be the Tyrannosaur. Heck, even some 6-legged cockroaches run on 2 if they want to move at maximum speed. Humans, OTOH, are pretty much adapted for endurance hunting. We might not be fast, but we can run-down anything on land. The added maneuverability probably helped evade faster animals (or we killed and ate them first, the human hand is a powerful weapon). Plus, if we fall in a hole we can step up a lot farther since we don't need three legs on the ground for stability.
I'm glad my teacher didn't agree with that assessment! It's more like the trait gave a selective advantage that caused animals that had it to reproduce more, on average, than those without the trait. Or, mathematically, S is slightly less for bipedals than quadrupedals.
I suppose the first generations that began the journey to being bipedal only needed to reproduce enough to give rise to a better bipedal, but it's just as likely that even gimpy bipedalism was an advantage. That's even assuming it was a step-wise transition, a jump wouldn't suffer that drawback.
Either way, being bipedal is an advantage over any invading traits, or it wouldn't be an evolutionarily stable strategy.
There are advantages to being bipedal, hence why humans and birds are. OTOH, we're a very long way from robots being comparable to animals in terms of freedom of movement, so a lot of those advantages are lost. But, if we solve a few problems the relevant advantages would be weight (2 vs 4 legs), efficiency (wheels are best, but humans are the most efficient long distance runners), and the ability to step out of a hole.
I smell Microsoft making a money grab since HTC likely doesn't want to fight more than one major corporation in a patent war at the same time. So the royalties are probably a bit less than what said patent war would cost, and Microsoft gets a cut from the Android pie. It also hurts the iPhone slightly, which probably helps Microsoft.
I was just going off of Wikipedia since our current methods wouldn't detect an Earth-like planet if it were there. Plus, it's "close" enough that one can interact with it without waiting a generation or two to get the response, and a person could theoretically travel there without it being a one-way trip.
Increasing the number of pixels per inch on screens should improve this. Thankfully, GUIs are finally starting to adjust to DPI, and cellphones have created a market for higher PPI screens. Obviously people will prefer a 300 PPI printout over a 72 PPI screen. Doubly so if their eyesight is worsening. (Which is why it's a bit sad to see people decrease their lcd screen's resolution without knowing any better.)
First question: did this Apple employee have authorization to take that prototype out of the Apple facility?
I'd imagine Apple was testing to see if any problems pop up with real world type use.
And at what point did the Giz editor discover that the prototype was "stolen"?
Almost certainly before paying $5,000 for it. The rightful owner is the only reason this story is newsworthy.
If Apple wants to call the prototype a trade secret, then how can they reconcile that claim with the fact that the prototype was left in a public place where anyone could see and examine it?
If they'd dismantled it at the bar without actually stealing it I think they'd have a much better case.
IMHO, it's more likely someone stole an iPhone from the bar intending to wipe it and sell it. He realized that it wasn't just any iPhone, so he sold it for a much higher price to a media outlet. Gizmodo jumped at the chance to run the story before realizing that buying stolen goods is, in fact, illegal. Alternatively, they calculated that the value of breaking the story exceeded the legal ramifications. This doesn't quite fit with Gizmodo's description of events (e.g. quotes from the untraceable "Random Really Drunk Guy"), but does fit with the parts that can be verified.
As far as Apple is concerned, I'd imagine they'd prefer to shift the story to "iPhone prototype stolen" from "Drunken Apple engineer loses iPhone prototype". That shifts the blame and doesn't have the implication that Apple engineers are drunkards. (Not that they are, but people subconsciously assume since all they know about the guy who lost the prototype is that he was drunk and he works for Apple.)
So, imagine that we detect the very first radio transmissions from a hypothetical rocky exoplanet around Alpha Centauri. That would mean we'd have roughly a 100 year technological advantage over the newly discovered intelligent species. What would we do?
IMHO, organizing an interstellar probe would be the first order of business. Next might be manned exploration, albeit both would easily take decades. We could probably send a nuke just as easily as a probe, but what would be the point? Starting an interstellar war would be an enormous waste of resources and effort. It'd be a lot easier to take a wait-and-see approach even if we could manage to send a significant military force.
Besides, chances are that we wouldn't be in direct competition for any resources. It'd be more like the discovery of Antarctica rather than North America.
Umm, even if Facebook didn't exist, why would you allow such pictures to be taken? If you're going to do something embarrassing, either ensure there's no proof, or don't do it around someone who doesn't keep secrets. It's not like Facebook is the only way the friend-of-a-friend potential boss is going to find out about your drunken debauchery. This is especially important if you live in a small town or are in a small profession.
This is my approach. I figure that having a facebook profile with my real name is basically a social necessity. I put up a list of my favorite books/movies/quotes, some publicly available contact information, and a few random "likes". I also allow myself to be tagged with community service events and similar. Anyone I come into contact with gets "friended", so my friend list isn't significantly more useful than a list of my networks, which mirrors my education and employment history.
My rationale is that I treat my Facebook page as a resume for both friends and prospective employers. I do keep enough information that someone can figure out who I am, and ignore friend request from people who I can't identify (e.g. a "private" profile with a useless baby picture and a common name). It is my suspicion that if I were investigating an applicant or someone I just met, I'd be a lot more suspicious of a very private or absent profile than one that reconfirmed what I already knew. It's human nature to assume that a secretive person has something interesting to hide, and even a casual use of Facebook would reinforce this assumption.
Yep, it's a real shame those surgeons don't spend more time fixing the world's political problems. I mean, why develop or pay for costly procedures, it's not cost effective at all! For the price of a single patient on NovoSeven we could save many thousands from malaria. Aborting a single high-risk pregnancy could save enough money to pay for proper prenatal care for dozens of low income women. Allowing a single child to die of leukemia rather than perform a costly bone marrow transplant could put every one of his classmates through college.
One benefit of being wealthy (as an individual or as a nation) is the ability to afford nice things. Since wealth isn't uniformly distributed, some people can afford such things while others cannot. As a wealthy nation we do fund quite a bit of foreign aid and public health initiatives in our own country. The cheap ideas that have a lot of measurable benefit are done unless there's a non economic/medical reason that prevents it. An example of which is that we spend more money on our own country's citizens than on another country's citizens due to a sense of responsibility and a respect for the other nation's autonomy. Another is that poor nations often have political issues that prevent cheap vaccines from being distributed.
My understanding is that this procedure was developed for burn patients and similar. They undergo hundreds of procedures and are still left looking quite abnormal. The social implications are tremendous, as are the alterations to their sense of identity. This procedure could dramatically improve their quality of life.
Full disclosure: my university has been working on this procedure for several years and have basically decided that they don't want to be the first. Apparently they're worried that the risk of rejection is too high, and if the face is rejected, what then? OTOH, I got all my info from one of the ethicists on the IRB, and not one of the core researchers. There are probably other reasons to not proceed despite allegedly being technically capable and ready for about 5 years now.
Using pre-1980 numbers for control won't work. Many forms of cancer have been increasing in prevalence over the years.
Advances in treatment can explain a lot of that. Prevalence is simply the number of people with the disease, so if people are living with it longer (i.e. not cured or killed) then the prevalence will increase despite the incidence staying the same.
The presence of so many confounding factors makes it nigh unto impossible to attribute any effect to cell phones without a real study.
IMHO, this is why such a study is meaningless (albeit I'm sure the reasons for conducting it are political). A person who doesn't use a cell phone is probably less sociable, which is known to have health effects (lowered risk of catching stuff, but overall negative IIRC). It could also be that poorer people are less likely to purchase plans with lots of minutes. Cell phones are too integrated in our lives to isolate as a variable for research.
A proper study (RCT) would do something like take prisioners with >15 year without parole sentences and randomize them into having a cell (no pun intended) that was flooded with EM radiation or not. But that's woefully unethical, would have less statistical power, and may not be extrapolatable to the general population.
I don't know about you, but I have a ~115 PPI screen, and if I can type on my laptop then I can easily distinguish individual pixels. Heck, I even see the two dead subpixels. So that's easily 400 PPI staring. The thing is, human eyes move, and the brain integrates that information. Apparently we can perceive at ~60 FPS, so that probably about ten images per saccade. Given what we can do with digital images, that multiplies the PPI by about 30 (assuming that mathematical image processing has caught up to natural selection). All-in-all, I'd say 10,000 PPI at two feet would be a very conservative estimate of when you'd max out the useful resolution for most people.
Another approach would be to realize you have ~200,000 cone cells/mm^3 in the fovea and the fovea is ~25 mm^3 per eye, so you have ~10 megapixel resolution for the central part of your vision alone. The fovea is responsible for a viewing field of ~4 in^2 at two feet. So that's a maximum resolution of 2,500,000 PPI before integration. I'm sure our visual system doesn't work anywhere near the maximum theoretical level (~100 megapixels per inch in central vision), but our current displays are six orders of magnitude below that.
If you round to the nearest integer rather than floor it, then it decreases the number of votes required.
.7 * 206 = 144.2; 145 votes required
.67 * 206 = 138.02; 139 votes required
.667 * 206 = 137.402; 138 votes required
.66 failed at both basic math and understanding the political rationale for the rule. (It's rather scary that a person can succeed in politics on charisma alone...)
The most damning thing is that 2/3 isn't terribly arbitrary of a number. It means that there are two yays for every nay. The person multiplying by
It depends on what you view as exploration. If you care about mapping the universe, finding out relative concentrations of various elements, and building better probes, then unmanned exploration is the best choice. If you care more about more literally "traveling somewhere in search of discovery", developing human-oriented technology, or learning more about biology then manned exploration is better. Plus, of things that are intrinsically useless, which stimulates the human mind more, knowing the mineral composition of Neptune's moons, or being able to scale Olympus Mons?
I've never used the GMA 950, so you could be right. My current laptop has a GMA 4500 MHD, which is considerably better than my old laptop's midrange nVidia. There's also the GMA 4700 MHD, which should be better still. The 4500 series was a pretty big jump from the 3100, which was a big jump from its predecessor, which (from what I hear) was fairly bad.
I agree that drunk driving is probably more dangerous, but implanting something isn't exactly harmless. If the implant isn't completely sterile an infection could easily cause the person to lose a limb, or die. Heck, even if it were sterile a person might be allergic to something in it, go into anaphylactic shock and die. Or the chip could physically break and pieces might go to the brain/heart/lungs and cause a stroke, heart attack, or pulmonary embolism. Or perhaps the chip has a toxic metal inside that leaks out. Or it's magnetic so the person gets an MRI and the chip gets torn out... through the other side. There are dozens of ways this could maim/kill.