How do we know it's the vast majority? The opposite way of looking at it is that people probably fall on a bell curve for how much they value their privacy, and to generate a statistically meaningful sample size Google had to offer $25. IOW, probably 99.5% of internet users capable of installing a Chrome plugin value their privacy at more than $25.
We also tend to lose perspective as geeks. Looking at our browsing history is essentially like following us around everywhere. It's a much smaller part of a "normal" person's life. It would take a lot more than $25 to convince most people to wear an all-seeing Google watch, just as it'd cost far more than $25 to convince a hardcore internet user to part with their complete browsing history. Attention-whores in either group non-withstanding.
Unfortunately, if you're someone who agrees with doing the logical thing--reducing the negative environmental impact of humans as much as possible, within reasonable economic boundaries--the exaggerations and alarmism sweep you away into being on a "side", and you're shoved right in the middle of the mosh pit of tribal politics.
I think this is an important point that is often forgotten. Personally, I don't consider myself to be in either camp, so I suppose I default to being a "denier". I absolutely agree that increasing atmospheric CO2 will have negative effects on humans at some level. Determining that level is a scientific question that's difficult to determine with a sample size of one and no way to do randomized trials. Plus it's been overly politicized.
From there, the next logical point is how to reduce CO2 production (or geoengineering or what-have-you). That's an economic and political question. Both camps seem to forget that they have a common eventual goal and are quibbling about the method to achieve it that minimizes human suffering. High energy costs kill poor people, just as crop failure kills poor people. Hopefully we can reach the nadir without arguing ourselves into inaction.
For most big electronics companies, it's simply not economically viable to manufacture here in the States.
Part of the reason people are going after Apple is because Apple isn't one of them. Their profit margins could easily support the somewhat higher manufacturing costs. Plus, Apple publicly praised the factory for their slave-like working conditions that facilitate rapid design changes at the CEO's whim.
Remember that the last article said that Apple was the best about being proactive about labor conditions...so where are the protests against the companies that aren't?
Not being the worst doesn't make you immune to criticism. Also, none of the other manufacturers have as much name recognition or as much influence over Foxconn. The former is necessary to garner enough support to influence the western company, and the latter is necessary for actual change to occur.
I think that's the only viable solution really. There is a reason that a general surgeon receives 9 years of education after college involving one of the most intense residencies. Anatomy is highly variable and computers have not been able to approach an acceptable level of judgement (e.g. 12 lead EKGs are read by the machine first, and are right maybe half the time if it's abnormal).
With surgery, bleeding the the most common complication, and it's easy for the surgical field to become filled with blood, and for the source of bleeding to slip away. Ultrasound isn't going to identify a small bleeding blood vessel, especially with air blocking the signal. Furthermore, bleeding often involves such a tiny perforation that you cannot even see the hole. If ultrasound used such a high frequency sound to have that kind of resolution and powerful enough for the necessary level of penetration it would literally cook the tissue in between. (That's actually one way to cauterize a bleeding vessel in laproscopic surgery, high-frequency sound.)
IMHO, there are three options for handling medical emergencies in space. The first is letting non-medical personnel handle it. Computer guidance may help, but these things are hard. A specialist with a decade of training and twice that in experience in a highly controlled environment runs into problems probably in the single digit percent range across most specialties. For emergencies, I'd expect the complication rate to be in the double digit percents. So, I do not believe letting pilots play doctor (or even nurse) is a good idea. The second option is to do tele-medicine, where a doctor controls a robot. For emergencies or surgery, the minute or longer time lag makes this impossible. The third option is to take physicians into space, which presents logistic problems, but is the best idea if you can't med-evac someone quickly.
Well, in that case we aren't really arguing. If you are covering subscribers, then GSM VS CDMA isn't as big of an issue. If you're covering area (i.e. a more uniformly distributed population) then the extra range lets the telcos get away with fewer towers.
Obviously, a tower 40 km away doesn't provide great service. It does work though, and the US telcos are more than happy to call it a day with that rather than invest more into infrastructure. As for my example, it's not economical for each community of 50 people to have its own cell phone tower, nor the individual houses dotting the landscape. The telcos could certainly afford to put up a lot more towers, but, given comparably pitiful investments, CDMA works better.
Saskatchewan has an overall population density of 4.6 people/mile^2, but the population is absolutely not uniformly distributed. 98% coverage must be of 'subscribers' rather than area. The actual coverage (pdf) is just of the major southern cities and roads.
Contrast this with, say, Eastern KY with a population density of 14 people/mile^2 (county dependent) that is more uniformly distributed. CDMA coverage is sketchy, and GSM is a bad joke. The maximum range of the signal is what makes it economical to service this area, and even then barely so.
Personally, I was wanting my next phone to be a Nexus so I wouldn't have to deal with carrier BS, but it looks like that's not a realistic option anymore. GSM is spotty in the whole state and nearly useless outside the major cities.
it really is; glad they're around, but you ever notice they never have a cure? Not even if it was half a mil for a one-time cure; their business is repeat customers with literally life-long lock-in.
Big Pharma: drug dealers in every sense of the phrase.
Umm... any researcher who figured out a way to cure a common disease would be set for life. Seriously, if your research paved the way to curing diabetes you'd never have to worry about finding grant money ever again, that is if you didn't retire on the Nobel Prize money and speaking deals. Every university would love that kind of publicity, so I can't see anyone who would try to prevent that in academia or with NIH (et. all) funding.
As for the economics for drug companies, think about it. For hyperlipidemia there are 13 drugs just in the statin class. Drug companies are facing fierce competition. Developing a cure would be massively profitable and crush their competitors. Major diseases do not remain uncured for lack of trying, they are simply impossible to cure with our current technology.
All that said, drug companies do make cures. Gastic ulcers, for example, used to be treated chronically but now we cure them with drug therapy. Thrombolytics are designed to cure clots in the brain so as to minimize disability after a stroke. Chemotherapy drugs are designed to eliminate cancer, just as antibiotics are designed to kill bacteria. Radioactive iodine can be used to cure hyperthyroidism rather than just chronically blocking the enzymes that produce thyroid hormone.
Interesting, I know of at least a few more costly drugs. Novoseven is used to treat bleeding disorders and at $7,000 per dose over a prolonged hospitalization it really adds up. Duke spent $5 million on a patient that way. My own local hospital had a patient like that a few years ago, $2 million dollars, a loss eaten by the hospital since the patient was uninsured.
We're getting very close to (or perhaps passed) the point that we cannot treat every person with maximal medical care. New treatments emerge all the time and they're very expensive. When nothing can be done, that's a tragedy beyond our control. When we can prolong life, but at a price, the economics force us to chose who to save.
And hope that it don't use a privilege escalation bug to do whatever it wants! The scary part about how quickly devices are rooted is how a malicious app could do the same, just for different purposes.
I would imagine one could politically argue that putting explosives on an unmanned aircraft is just a convoluted way of making a missile, the use of which would be an act of war. Furthermore, I'm sure the designers made them exceptionally difficult to reverse engineer, and there are probably digital and perhaps even chemical self-destruct mechanisms that aren't as flashy nor leave as much visible external evidence. For all we know, Iran got a warped airframe with a bunch of melted circuit boards and oxidized stealth paint.
Well, historically, astronomic events have eradicated most life on Earth several times. It's probably the reason intelligent life was able to evolve, i.e. life never stays in an evolutionarily stable system. As for how real the threat is... If the Tunguska Event hadn't happened in one of the least populated areas of the planet then the loss of human life would have been tremendous (~15 Megaton explosion).
That said, we're defenseless against many astronomic events, such as a Gamma Ray Burst (we get a decent hit every 5M years or so). As for terrestrial causes of mass loss of life, I'd imagine the economy is the foremost killer. It costs us an incredible number of life-years each year due to cheap food, stress, addiction, and poor access to healthcare. A poor person dying because they can't afford to safely heat their poorly insulated home in the winter is less glamorous than a coastal city being hit by a hurricane/tsunami/slowing rising sea levels, but mundane causes of death really add up. That might not fit everyone's idea of a catastrophe, but that's simply because it's constantly happening rather than being an uncommon and spectacular event.
Shoot him? If they decide to sink the ship somewhere then it'd only be fitting for the captain to accompany it... albeit in the brig so he can't fall into anymore lifeboats.
You can think of cloud providers as hard drives. You can probably count on them for a couple years, but given enough time failure is inevitable. Differences include data security, and the fact that several cloud providers may be involved in a coordinated take down (or buy out).
Transposons were discovered in 1948 in maize and much of modern genetic engineering technique has been derived from studying how these genes relocate. In fact, one theory is that they were the precursors to viruses. If you're having trouble gleaning the implications of this, horizontal gene transfer and genomic rearrangement happen all the time in nature.
If a bacteria dies, its DNA is left laying around. Competent bacteria will assimilate it. This is one way we get multidrug resistant organisms (bacterium A develops resistance to antibiotic A but dies to antibiotic B, whereas bacterium B is immune to antibiotic B, picks up A's genes and is now resistant to both antibiotics). This isn't mating either, it occurs across organisms that are more different than a cactus and a frog. Viruses also carry genes between species (they focus on numbers when reproducing, not accuracy, so often parts of the host's DNA get placed in viral capsules). Specifically, the tobacco mosaic virus, one of the tools used in genetic engineering, has undoubtedly carried many orders of magnitude more "natural" foreign DNA than synthetic DNA in labs.
So, remember that evolution requires "mutation". These examples of gene transfer are one method this occurs, and rather more likely to convey a beneficial trait than a random base pair change caused by UV light or whatever. Just like the reactions performed in the LHC have all occurred in the upper atmosphere, I would expect that all reactions that occur in a genetics lab have occurred in nature over the billions of years of life and untold number of lifeforms. So, instead of waiting for a gene transfer to occur naturally, we do it artificially. The time frame for specific desirable changes has merely gone from years/decades to months/years. The only "nonsense" in the comparison of the two methods is the average layperson's understanding of genetic engineering and natural selection.
First world was the US and allies, second was the USSR and allies, and third were unallied countries. Generally the latter were underdeveloped, which is what people generally mean by the term.
(Not that this pedantry negates your point in any way.)
Amazon had a nice sell today on Kindle versions of several textbooks, and I noticed that I was charged my state's sales tax to download them (no Amazon datacenters are in my state). IMHO, Amazon should place the name/picture of the legislator responsible right next to that line item. Preferably holding money bags.
It sounds like she didn't have an abruption after all. While I'm not privy to the details of your daughter's situation, patients often ask for tests and procedures that are not necessary. Pregnant women wanting additional ultrasounds is the classic example. Often this is late enough in the pregnancy to determine the sex of the child, which is something parents want to know despite it being medically unnecessary.
A good doctor will refuse to perform and bill the government/insurance company for such a procedure (you may pay out of pocket for it if it's not something harmful). A rich doctor will invent a reason and do it anyway. A bad doctor remembers the one time an unnecessary test did show something unexpected, so they rely on their anecdotal experience and waste limited healthcare dollars.
All that said, a technically skilled doctor may have poor communication skills and not explain this to patients properly (what I expect happened here). OTOH, it's sometimes cheaper to do a test than for the doctor to spend the time explaining why it's unnecessary (or to quell fears). For abruption, 80% of women have bleeding, 70% have pain, and 60% have fetal distress. If these symptoms are absent, and the history isn't particularly worrisome (e.g. automobile accident, cocaine use, prior abruptions, accident just happened) then a high resolution ultrasound to look for a tiny abruption doesn't make economic or medical sense. (Also, the treatment is to manage blood loss and to perform an emergency delivery, so detection before symptoms isn't that helpful. You can't exactly superglue the placenta back to the uterus.)
There are other tests, such as the SLUMS. However, different clinicians use different tests because of this mess, which makes it difficult when a patient switches providers. For example, in the MMSE a patient is asked to copy a drawing of two overlapping geometric shapes. In the SLUMS they're asked to draw an analog clock. With the same test you can compare results over time and track the progression of the patient's dementia. With different tests, the results are not directly comparable. Overall scores also tend to vary more between different tests than within the same test over time.
As for writing more directly comparable questions, that's also difficult. For example, orientation involves who and where are you, and today's date. Another part is remembering three items after about five minutes. Even the math question, serial subtraction (100 - 7 = 93, 93 - 7 = 86, 86 - 7 = 79, 79 - 7 = 72, 72 - 7 = 65), will vary significantly in difficulty if you pick different numbers.
Given how much their design favors profitability and marketing over security and utility, I think we need to look at the former for the answer. My theory is that the people who solve their own problems (e.g. potential programmers) are not the same type that buy "solutions", hence not the target demographic. They'd far rather you buy an app to do something or become frustrated and return to being a helpless consumer.
Heirloom stuff has lost much of its nutritional value because it's too imbred. As for what our bodies are optimized for, it's certainly nothing you can find on a farm or in a grocery store. 10,000 years of agriculture have allowed us to artificially select desirable traits in plants, which does the same thing as genetic engineering. Here is an article trying to reverse engineer the genetic modifications that took the tomato from a 1 g fruit to a 1000 g fruit.
Gene transfer happens in nature anyway, much like the experiments done by the LHC occur in the upper atmosphere routinely. That is why you cannot find the plant we modified into the tomato (or any crop), the genes from the artificial version we've cultivated have contaminated the natural version we started with, until neither resemble what a pre-agricultural human would have eaten.
Underclocking at the same voltage worsens your battery life. The concept is called "race to idle". Basically, if the processor takes 2 V under load, it's better to finish in 1 second at 1000 MHz than 1.7 seconds at 600 MHz. Since modern processors use nearly zero power in idle, the former is close to 60-70% more efficient.
Priapism is usually painful, and often ends with either someone drawing off the blood with a needle or necrosis of the penis. But, hey, if you're into that kind of thing, I'm not here to judge.
They also said that they have to do any transfers of animals in the middle of the night because of death threats by animal rights activists.
Back in college I applied to be a caretaker for the medical school's animal testing facility. It was an unlabeled building, tall but very narrow, surrounded on three sides, unmarked on the campus maps, and unlabeled except for an abstract logo based on a non-obvious acronym. To enter there were double keycarded doors on the outside, no lobby or anything. There were plenty of windows, but they all revealed only office space (unused, come to think of it, despite it being a weekday morning). Apparently the building is mostly underground, where they house a decent sized stable to test on livestock (among other animals, I'm not privy to the extent of the research performed).
I kept looking for an Umbrella logo, but didn't see any. It's a sad world in which scientists have to take such precautions. The only reason I found out about the facility was because I was pre-med and an upper level biology major. Apparently the sheep or goats or whatever with artificial hearts needed 24 hour sitters to alert the medical staff if something went amiss.
those who eat and drive increase the odds of an accident by 80% You are 23 times more likely to have an accident while texting and driving. That's not a typo, 23 times more likely to crash!
So the site isn't internally consistent. Also, they claim 83% of drivers drink beverages while driving, and 70% eat, so obviously food or beverages are likely to be in the car when there's an accident. Lots of commuters drink coffee on the way to work, and lots of accidents happen in the morning rush hour. I'm sure some are caused by being distracted with coffee, but a lot aren't. If the studies relied on "were you sipping your beverage during the accident?" people would lie, so presumably they just looked to see if there was food or a drink in the vehicle. Contrast this with texting, which you can pin down to the minute of the accident.
Slashdot Mirror
How do we know it's the vast majority? The opposite way of looking at it is that people probably fall on a bell curve for how much they value their privacy, and to generate a statistically meaningful sample size Google had to offer $25. IOW, probably 99.5% of internet users capable of installing a Chrome plugin value their privacy at more than $25.
We also tend to lose perspective as geeks. Looking at our browsing history is essentially like following us around everywhere. It's a much smaller part of a "normal" person's life. It would take a lot more than $25 to convince most people to wear an all-seeing Google watch, just as it'd cost far more than $25 to convince a hardcore internet user to part with their complete browsing history. Attention-whores in either group non-withstanding.
Unfortunately, if you're someone who agrees with doing the logical thing--reducing the negative environmental impact of humans as much as possible, within reasonable economic boundaries--the exaggerations and alarmism sweep you away into being on a "side", and you're shoved right in the middle of the mosh pit of tribal politics.
I think this is an important point that is often forgotten. Personally, I don't consider myself to be in either camp, so I suppose I default to being a "denier". I absolutely agree that increasing atmospheric CO2 will have negative effects on humans at some level. Determining that level is a scientific question that's difficult to determine with a sample size of one and no way to do randomized trials. Plus it's been overly politicized.
From there, the next logical point is how to reduce CO2 production (or geoengineering or what-have-you). That's an economic and political question. Both camps seem to forget that they have a common eventual goal and are quibbling about the method to achieve it that minimizes human suffering. High energy costs kill poor people, just as crop failure kills poor people. Hopefully we can reach the nadir without arguing ourselves into inaction.
For most big electronics companies, it's simply not economically viable to manufacture here in the States.
Part of the reason people are going after Apple is because Apple isn't one of them. Their profit margins could easily support the somewhat higher manufacturing costs. Plus, Apple publicly praised the factory for their slave-like working conditions that facilitate rapid design changes at the CEO's whim.
Remember that the last article said that Apple was the best about being proactive about labor conditions...so where are the protests against the companies that aren't?
Not being the worst doesn't make you immune to criticism. Also, none of the other manufacturers have as much name recognition or as much influence over Foxconn. The former is necessary to garner enough support to influence the western company, and the latter is necessary for actual change to occur.
I think that's the only viable solution really. There is a reason that a general surgeon receives 9 years of education after college involving one of the most intense residencies. Anatomy is highly variable and computers have not been able to approach an acceptable level of judgement (e.g. 12 lead EKGs are read by the machine first, and are right maybe half the time if it's abnormal).
With surgery, bleeding the the most common complication, and it's easy for the surgical field to become filled with blood, and for the source of bleeding to slip away. Ultrasound isn't going to identify a small bleeding blood vessel, especially with air blocking the signal. Furthermore, bleeding often involves such a tiny perforation that you cannot even see the hole. If ultrasound used such a high frequency sound to have that kind of resolution and powerful enough for the necessary level of penetration it would literally cook the tissue in between. (That's actually one way to cauterize a bleeding vessel in laproscopic surgery, high-frequency sound.)
IMHO, there are three options for handling medical emergencies in space. The first is letting non-medical personnel handle it. Computer guidance may help, but these things are hard. A specialist with a decade of training and twice that in experience in a highly controlled environment runs into problems probably in the single digit percent range across most specialties. For emergencies, I'd expect the complication rate to be in the double digit percents. So, I do not believe letting pilots play doctor (or even nurse) is a good idea. The second option is to do tele-medicine, where a doctor controls a robot. For emergencies or surgery, the minute or longer time lag makes this impossible. The third option is to take physicians into space, which presents logistic problems, but is the best idea if you can't med-evac someone quickly.
Well, in that case we aren't really arguing. If you are covering subscribers, then GSM VS CDMA isn't as big of an issue. If you're covering area (i.e. a more uniformly distributed population) then the extra range lets the telcos get away with fewer towers.
Obviously, a tower 40 km away doesn't provide great service. It does work though, and the US telcos are more than happy to call it a day with that rather than invest more into infrastructure. As for my example, it's not economical for each community of 50 people to have its own cell phone tower, nor the individual houses dotting the landscape. The telcos could certainly afford to put up a lot more towers, but, given comparably pitiful investments, CDMA works better.
Saskatchewan has an overall population density of 4.6 people/mile^2, but the population is absolutely not uniformly distributed. 98% coverage must be of 'subscribers' rather than area. The actual coverage (pdf) is just of the major southern cities and roads.
Contrast this with, say, Eastern KY with a population density of 14 people/mile^2 (county dependent) that is more uniformly distributed. CDMA coverage is sketchy, and GSM is a bad joke. The maximum range of the signal is what makes it economical to service this area, and even then barely so.
Personally, I was wanting my next phone to be a Nexus so I wouldn't have to deal with carrier BS, but it looks like that's not a realistic option anymore. GSM is spotty in the whole state and nearly useless outside the major cities.
it really is; glad they're around, but you ever notice they never have a cure? Not even if it was half a mil for a one-time cure; their business is repeat customers with literally life-long lock-in. Big Pharma: drug dealers in every sense of the phrase.
Umm... any researcher who figured out a way to cure a common disease would be set for life. Seriously, if your research paved the way to curing diabetes you'd never have to worry about finding grant money ever again, that is if you didn't retire on the Nobel Prize money and speaking deals. Every university would love that kind of publicity, so I can't see anyone who would try to prevent that in academia or with NIH (et. all) funding.
As for the economics for drug companies, think about it. For hyperlipidemia there are 13 drugs just in the statin class. Drug companies are facing fierce competition. Developing a cure would be massively profitable and crush their competitors. Major diseases do not remain uncured for lack of trying, they are simply impossible to cure with our current technology.
All that said, drug companies do make cures. Gastic ulcers, for example, used to be treated chronically but now we cure them with drug therapy. Thrombolytics are designed to cure clots in the brain so as to minimize disability after a stroke. Chemotherapy drugs are designed to eliminate cancer, just as antibiotics are designed to kill bacteria. Radioactive iodine can be used to cure hyperthyroidism rather than just chronically blocking the enzymes that produce thyroid hormone.
Interesting, I know of at least a few more costly drugs. Novoseven is used to treat bleeding disorders and at $7,000 per dose over a prolonged hospitalization it really adds up. Duke spent $5 million on a patient that way. My own local hospital had a patient like that a few years ago, $2 million dollars, a loss eaten by the hospital since the patient was uninsured.
We're getting very close to (or perhaps passed) the point that we cannot treat every person with maximal medical care. New treatments emerge all the time and they're very expensive. When nothing can be done, that's a tragedy beyond our control. When we can prolong life, but at a price, the economics force us to chose who to save.
And hope that it don't use a privilege escalation bug to do whatever it wants! The scary part about how quickly devices are rooted is how a malicious app could do the same, just for different purposes.
I would imagine one could politically argue that putting explosives on an unmanned aircraft is just a convoluted way of making a missile, the use of which would be an act of war. Furthermore, I'm sure the designers made them exceptionally difficult to reverse engineer, and there are probably digital and perhaps even chemical self-destruct mechanisms that aren't as flashy nor leave as much visible external evidence. For all we know, Iran got a warped airframe with a bunch of melted circuit boards and oxidized stealth paint.
Well, historically, astronomic events have eradicated most life on Earth several times. It's probably the reason intelligent life was able to evolve, i.e. life never stays in an evolutionarily stable system. As for how real the threat is... If the Tunguska Event hadn't happened in one of the least populated areas of the planet then the loss of human life would have been tremendous (~15 Megaton explosion).
That said, we're defenseless against many astronomic events, such as a Gamma Ray Burst (we get a decent hit every 5M years or so). As for terrestrial causes of mass loss of life, I'd imagine the economy is the foremost killer. It costs us an incredible number of life-years each year due to cheap food, stress, addiction, and poor access to healthcare. A poor person dying because they can't afford to safely heat their poorly insulated home in the winter is less glamorous than a coastal city being hit by a hurricane/tsunami/slowing rising sea levels, but mundane causes of death really add up. That might not fit everyone's idea of a catastrophe, but that's simply because it's constantly happening rather than being an uncommon and spectacular event.
Shoot him? If they decide to sink the ship somewhere then it'd only be fitting for the captain to accompany it... albeit in the brig so he can't fall into anymore lifeboats.
Well, the City of New London had the right to do that because of the tenth amendment.
You can think of cloud providers as hard drives. You can probably count on them for a couple years, but given enough time failure is inevitable. Differences include data security, and the fact that several cloud providers may be involved in a coordinated take down (or buy out).
Transposons were discovered in 1948 in maize and much of modern genetic engineering technique has been derived from studying how these genes relocate. In fact, one theory is that they were the precursors to viruses. If you're having trouble gleaning the implications of this, horizontal gene transfer and genomic rearrangement happen all the time in nature.
If a bacteria dies, its DNA is left laying around. Competent bacteria will assimilate it. This is one way we get multidrug resistant organisms (bacterium A develops resistance to antibiotic A but dies to antibiotic B, whereas bacterium B is immune to antibiotic B, picks up A's genes and is now resistant to both antibiotics). This isn't mating either, it occurs across organisms that are more different than a cactus and a frog. Viruses also carry genes between species (they focus on numbers when reproducing, not accuracy, so often parts of the host's DNA get placed in viral capsules). Specifically, the tobacco mosaic virus, one of the tools used in genetic engineering, has undoubtedly carried many orders of magnitude more "natural" foreign DNA than synthetic DNA in labs.
So, remember that evolution requires "mutation". These examples of gene transfer are one method this occurs, and rather more likely to convey a beneficial trait than a random base pair change caused by UV light or whatever. Just like the reactions performed in the LHC have all occurred in the upper atmosphere, I would expect that all reactions that occur in a genetics lab have occurred in nature over the billions of years of life and untold number of lifeforms. So, instead of waiting for a gene transfer to occur naturally, we do it artificially. The time frame for specific desirable changes has merely gone from years/decades to months/years. The only "nonsense" in the comparison of the two methods is the average layperson's understanding of genetic engineering and natural selection.
Well, Russia is second world by definition.
First world was the US and allies, second was the USSR and allies, and third were unallied countries. Generally the latter were underdeveloped, which is what people generally mean by the term.
(Not that this pedantry negates your point in any way.)
Amazon had a nice sell today on Kindle versions of several textbooks, and I noticed that I was charged my state's sales tax to download them (no Amazon datacenters are in my state). IMHO, Amazon should place the name/picture of the legislator responsible right next to that line item. Preferably holding money bags.
It sounds like she didn't have an abruption after all. While I'm not privy to the details of your daughter's situation, patients often ask for tests and procedures that are not necessary. Pregnant women wanting additional ultrasounds is the classic example. Often this is late enough in the pregnancy to determine the sex of the child, which is something parents want to know despite it being medically unnecessary.
A good doctor will refuse to perform and bill the government/insurance company for such a procedure (you may pay out of pocket for it if it's not something harmful). A rich doctor will invent a reason and do it anyway. A bad doctor remembers the one time an unnecessary test did show something unexpected, so they rely on their anecdotal experience and waste limited healthcare dollars.
All that said, a technically skilled doctor may have poor communication skills and not explain this to patients properly (what I expect happened here). OTOH, it's sometimes cheaper to do a test than for the doctor to spend the time explaining why it's unnecessary (or to quell fears). For abruption, 80% of women have bleeding, 70% have pain, and 60% have fetal distress. If these symptoms are absent, and the history isn't particularly worrisome (e.g. automobile accident, cocaine use, prior abruptions, accident just happened) then a high resolution ultrasound to look for a tiny abruption doesn't make economic or medical sense. (Also, the treatment is to manage blood loss and to perform an emergency delivery, so detection before symptoms isn't that helpful. You can't exactly superglue the placenta back to the uterus.)
There are other tests, such as the SLUMS. However, different clinicians use different tests because of this mess, which makes it difficult when a patient switches providers. For example, in the MMSE a patient is asked to copy a drawing of two overlapping geometric shapes. In the SLUMS they're asked to draw an analog clock. With the same test you can compare results over time and track the progression of the patient's dementia. With different tests, the results are not directly comparable. Overall scores also tend to vary more between different tests than within the same test over time.
As for writing more directly comparable questions, that's also difficult. For example, orientation involves who and where are you, and today's date. Another part is remembering three items after about five minutes. Even the math question, serial subtraction (100 - 7 = 93, 93 - 7 = 86, 86 - 7 = 79, 79 - 7 = 72, 72 - 7 = 65), will vary significantly in difficulty if you pick different numbers.
Given how much their design favors profitability and marketing over security and utility, I think we need to look at the former for the answer. My theory is that the people who solve their own problems (e.g. potential programmers) are not the same type that buy "solutions", hence not the target demographic. They'd far rather you buy an app to do something or become frustrated and return to being a helpless consumer.
Heirloom stuff has lost much of its nutritional value because it's too imbred. As for what our bodies are optimized for, it's certainly nothing you can find on a farm or in a grocery store. 10,000 years of agriculture have allowed us to artificially select desirable traits in plants, which does the same thing as genetic engineering. Here is an article trying to reverse engineer the genetic modifications that took the tomato from a 1 g fruit to a 1000 g fruit.
Gene transfer happens in nature anyway, much like the experiments done by the LHC occur in the upper atmosphere routinely. That is why you cannot find the plant we modified into the tomato (or any crop), the genes from the artificial version we've cultivated have contaminated the natural version we started with, until neither resemble what a pre-agricultural human would have eaten.
Underclocking at the same voltage worsens your battery life. The concept is called "race to idle". Basically, if the processor takes 2 V under load, it's better to finish in 1 second at 1000 MHz than 1.7 seconds at 600 MHz. Since modern processors use nearly zero power in idle, the former is close to 60-70% more efficient.
Priapism is usually painful, and often ends with either someone drawing off the blood with a needle or necrosis of the penis. But, hey, if you're into that kind of thing, I'm not here to judge.
They also said that they have to do any transfers of animals in the middle of the night because of death threats by animal rights activists.
Back in college I applied to be a caretaker for the medical school's animal testing facility. It was an unlabeled building, tall but very narrow, surrounded on three sides, unmarked on the campus maps, and unlabeled except for an abstract logo based on a non-obvious acronym. To enter there were double keycarded doors on the outside, no lobby or anything. There were plenty of windows, but they all revealed only office space (unused, come to think of it, despite it being a weekday morning). Apparently the building is mostly underground, where they house a decent sized stable to test on livestock (among other animals, I'm not privy to the extent of the research performed).
I kept looking for an Umbrella logo, but didn't see any. It's a sad world in which scientists have to take such precautions. The only reason I found out about the facility was because I was pre-med and an upper level biology major. Apparently the sheep or goats or whatever with artificial hearts needed 24 hour sitters to alert the medical staff if something went amiss.
From that site:
those who eat and drive increase the odds of an accident by 80%
You are 23 times more likely to have an accident while texting and driving. That's not a typo, 23 times more likely to crash!
So the site isn't internally consistent. Also, they claim 83% of drivers drink beverages while driving, and 70% eat, so obviously food or beverages are likely to be in the car when there's an accident. Lots of commuters drink coffee on the way to work, and lots of accidents happen in the morning rush hour. I'm sure some are caused by being distracted with coffee, but a lot aren't. If the studies relied on "were you sipping your beverage during the accident?" people would lie, so presumably they just looked to see if there was food or a drink in the vehicle. Contrast this with texting, which you can pin down to the minute of the accident.