This is another PR statement that inflates the actual findings so much that they become unrecognizable. For those interested in the details, the original article is here (it is paywalled). The TL;DR version of the original article is as follows:
1. There is a protein (ABHD2) that controls sperm motility.
2. ABHD2 activated progesterone and is blocked by other steroid hormones.
3. After ovulation progesterone is released by the cumulus cells that surround the egg. This release of progesterone activates nearby sperm to move faster.
4. There is a class of compounds produced by plants that are called triterpenoids. Some of these compounds mimic steroid hormones.
5. By virtue of their ability to mimic steroid hormones two triterpenoids (pristimerin and lupeol) can bind to ABHD2 and block it in the same way steroid hormones do.
These were the finding of the papers. Now look at the claims in the PR statement:
1. Traditional Chinese medicine. There is hardly a plant or organic matter that is not used for one purpose or other in traditional Chinese medicine (Traditional Chinese medicine is akin to internet porn - if something exists there is a traditional Chinese medicine made from it). Plants make insane diversity of chemical compounds. Anyone will be hard pressed to find a naturally occurring plant compound that does not exist in at least one plant used by traditional Chinese medicine. While this claim may technically be true, it is completely meaningless.
2. Contraceptive activity of the compounds. The compounds had marginal inhibitory effect (6-10%) on sperm motility when the sperm was activated with progesterone, and no effect on the motility of sperm not activated by progesterone. Will this prevent fertilization? The study did not report the results of experiments that will directly test the contraceptive effect of the compounds. This claims is obviously false.
3. The compounds are not hormonal. Technically speaking, they are not steroid hormones. In reality, they act as steroid hormones, otherwise they would not have been able to block ABHD2. This claims seems patently false to me.
4. "Perfect contraceptives". If you scan the research literature with the names of the compounds you will find that they exhibit all kinds of completely unrelated activities when applied to human cells. This means that one or more of the following are true; (i) these are "sticky" compounds that hit multiple targets; (ii) The compounds are not pure and is impossible to tell if what you observe is the activity of the compound or of the impurities (this happens very often when isolating compounds from plants); (iii) The compounds hit target that is important for many cell types in the body. Regardless of what the explanation is, these compounds are no "magic bullets". "Carpet bombing" seems to be more suitable analogy.
p-values for individual SNPs range from 5*10^-4 to 9*10^-14. Considering that all of the genome regions they identify are marked by clusters of SNPs that show correlation with intelligence, I would say that their results are statistically significant.
I don't think so. For their SNP (DNA variant) discovery tests they used 12 cohorts tested, depending on the cohort by 8 different measures of intelligence. The cohorts had mean ages from 6 to 62 years. Then they took the genes associated with the DNA variants they discovered and check correlation with various traits - ranging from waist-to-hip ration, through neurological disorders to educational attainment. The strongest positive correlation is with educational attainment. Top negative correlations are with Alzheimer's, depression and ADHD.
So they used did not pick individual measures, they actually used all of them and sourced a broad and diverse cohort of people of European discent. Then they validated their results using and orthogonal test, that did not depend on the variables used for the DNA variant discovery. This is exactly the opposite of p-hacking.
Yeah and to comments up in the discussion, the study say nothing about race. They clearly state in their methods that they used individuals of European origin. So these genes are associated with intelligence in Europeans. The genes affecting intelligence in other races and populations may or may not be the same.
I call bullshit on this one. There is no way you can actually watch cable TV and not know what a commercial is. Even with a DVR you'll still see them.
Keep in mind that we are talking about kids under ten. If nobody explained to them what a commercial is it is very likely that they see it as normal TV show.
It could be just me, but I wouldn't worry so much about the kids on Netflix not knowing what a commercial is. You would kind of expect that. What worries me is that
38% of kids in regular television homes don't know what commercials are
. I am sure these kids will grow up and learn what a commercial is, but considering the amount of commercial on American TV it is hard to believe that they have not been heavily exposed to those.
Why is this bullshit moded "interesting"?
US unemployment has been steadily declining for the past 7 year of the Obama administration, after the previous "business friendly" president completely fucked up the economy by refusing to regulate the banking sector. Obama's "economically toxic" policies seem to have been very good for the economy. I hope you don't think sticking a label will make us ignore the facts. Most of the slashdot crowd is not that stupid. Please do not offend us with you idiocy.
You miss the point. Obama through ACA (obamacare) helped the miners by increasing their healthcare benefits and providing the families of deceased miners with benefits. They hated him with passion in return, now they stand to lose those benefits. They are decent hard working people, but this doesn't change the fact they have been brainwashed to absurd levels and because of that every choice they make ends up hurting them. There is no future for coal and not because Obama hates miners, but because it is no longer economical, even with the subsidies and underhand tricks that are being played out. It cannot sustain the Appalachian region economy. Yet most people in the region consistently vote for representatives that promise them to bring back the old coal jobs. They even elected Jim Justice for governor of West Virginia. This is the guy whose mines repeatedly placed miners lives at risk by skirting safety regulations. Then he screwed them again by not paying millions in fines, local taxes and severance fees.
What about it? This is a problem that has both modern and very old solutions. Long time ago when nuclear was generating excess power at night when demand is low, people made pumping hydroelectric plants. They used excess power to pump water uphill during the night and reversed the flow to generate power during peak hours. With solar they will pump water during the day and generate power during the night. We have thermal solar power plants that can store heat in molten salt for night time generation. We have utility size batteries that can store power for night time use.
You seem to forget that solar is not the only renewable. We also have wind which is as competitive as solar. While the sun doesn't shine at night, the wind keeps blowing.
As we use less power during the night we need to generate less, so photo voltaic solar plants coming offline during the night can be compensated by storage, wind and hydro. And I would love if we maintain and develop nuclear power for baseline generation. Unfortunately this is getting more and more expensive.
If we send 1000 people to Mars how exactly are we going to feed them? I have heard enough about spaceships, engines, fuel and robots. Has anybody done some thinking on the steaks and the veggies?
... machine learning is the solution. And cancer is not "like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells". That is how an actual virus works, hence the analogy by which the "computer virus" term came to be. Cancer is more like when a bit randomly flips in RAM and then by pure coincidence this causes a memory leak within an infinite loop that spreads shit all over the place until everything comes crashing down.
What I wonder after reading this sorry story is: was Holmes aware that she was selling snake oil all along, or did she start out with the genuinely belief that her company could make the technology work? I'm willing to believe the latter: they did try, but the longer their breakthrough failed to materialize, the more they had to shift their efforts towards keeping up appearances, or "controlling the narrative" as it's called.
Holmes new the technology cannot possibly work. According to the articles I have read on the topic (including the one in Vanity Fair) she was told so directly by her professors at Stanford when she approached them with the startup idea. Her chief scientist was telling her that the thing is not working. What did she do? She stuffed her board with people who new nothing about biology, chemistry or engineering. The job of her second in command at the company was exclusively to suppress information leaking out. So yes, she new what she was doing: scamming people out of their money.
The VF article also tells a disturbing story how friends and political connections of her father basically propped up the company, gave it legitimacy and suppressed inquiry through legal threats (David Boies) and by using their commanding position in the military (Gen. James Mattis).
Eradicating an abundant species that is in the middle of a food chain tends to impact the food chain above it. Anything that feeds on mosquitoes or their larvae, as well as any animal that feeds on the animals that eat mosquitoes may be impacted. It will also depend on the specific ecosystem where the mosquitoes are being eliminated. Tropical forests with their diversity of insects will be less affected (although highly specialized species like Gambia fish will go the way of the Dodo bird without mosquitoes). Tundra ecosystems where mosquitoes are large chunk of the insect biomass will be hit harder. You can also have effects that are hard to anticipate. For example, caribou migration routes are effected by mosquitoes (caribous like us tend to avoid being attacked by large swarms of insects). This in turn affects where lichens are being eaten and where caribous fertilize the soil with their dung. It may sound as cliche, but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and we have very compelling evidence that pathogens, including the ones spread by mosquitoes, affect the evolution of their hosts.
On the other hand, what are the chances that wiping out couple of the hundreds of mosquito species will have a major long lasting impact?
All the consequences and their impact are hard to predict, but easy to verify once they happen (at least the short term ones). The best approach would be to eliminate locally mosquitoes in various environments and measure the effect on the ecosystem. If nothing bad happens than let's scale up and eliminate more of them (yeah I know, humanity's ability to agree on long term systematic approach and execute it to completion is not one of its strengths). For a while we will not have to scratch ourselves, then some other bug will fill the niche (blood is too tasty and filling meal, to be left wandering around).
Because of Hillary we are going to have president Trump. Reading through the articles it appears that her defense boils down to her being complete moron. She has hard time recalling anything (really she did not recall training, there must be a paper record if she took it), and she thought the common prefix for classified paragraphs, "(C)", was indicating alphabetized order (seems her version of the English alphabet consists of a single C letter repeated over and over again).
My understanding of the UCLA copyright policy is that the rights are divided by the university and the people who created the code (staff, students). The university has the largest share. I am not sure students are always entitled to a share. It will probably depend to a large degree on how involved the supervisor was in developing the code and how much the student contributed intellectually to the project. There is a quote in LA Times that suggests that the professor was more involved than usual with the work of the student:
Klug, who was described by friends as a kind and caring man, worked diligently to help Sarkar finish his dissertation and graduate, even though the quality of Sarkar’s work was not stellar, one source said.
“Bill was extremely generous to this student, who was a subpar student,” the person said.
Passing code and data from one student to another is a normal and common practice that ensures continuity of the project, reproducibility of the research, etc. This guy is clearly nuts.
I was just dealing with the fallout of a forced win7 to win10 upgrade. Windows 10 is more resource hungry - particularly RAM. The recommended 2GB are a joke. You need 6GB for it to feel usable. It also lacks drivers for ubiquitous hardware modules that are not that fresh. In my case it was NVIDIA G210M card with hybrid engine - this is the setup where the laptop switches between discrete and integrated graphics, depending on the power state. The lack of support was something I could live with - just use the old windows 7 driver. Except I can't, because updates are now mandatory and automatic. Windows 10 insists on updating to the latest and greatest nvidia driver, which fails causing the OS to use the default VGA driver and produce grotesquely distorted picture. So buying new PC with windows 10 is ok. Upgrading an old system, particularly a laptop may be very frustrating. Failed updates sometimes result in unbootable system, which in my case could only be fixed with clean install. Did I mention that you have no control over the updates??? The come the privacy issues, which are discussed at length by others.
And also time to start thinking about what to do when most jobs are done by robots (owned by rich people or corporations) and almost everyone is unemployed.
Exactly that! There is no cost to labor that is low enough to make it competitive with modern day automation. Talking heads that say minimum wage rises are making companies to switch to automation, don't know what they are talking about (TFA shows that quite well). Sure strawberry picking may still be a human domain, but for how long? Even if human labor was free, it will be hard press to compete with the consistency and productivity that automation brings. So yes, it is time to think how a society will function when most people will not have jobs. What would happen to such society if labor is the only source of income and jobless people are being talked down?
Google definitely has the right idea with Project Fi. Project Fi alone can make you buy into their android ecosystem. I have been using it for a few months. It truly shines when traveling abroad. For the first time in my life I feel like I have a real mobile device. I no longer need to swap sim cards or pay roaming (especially data roaming!). The other killer feature are the seamless wifi call integration. Helps a lot in area with poor wireless coverage (my home). It is beyond me why Apple will discard the idea so lightly. They are facing stiff competition both in the device and multimedia business. Integrating the network into their ecosystem is not a bad way to grow their business and increase the value of their current offerings.
Self driving cars reduce congestion the same way food reduces obesity. What helps with congestion is adding lanes (good luck with that in SF) or reducing the number of cars on the road (very unamerican). The best practical solutions to congestion are: 1. large capacity public transport that stays off the roads (aka trains); 2. Integrated business and living areas cities, so you don't need to drive to get a carton of milk and if possible walk/bike to work.
Slashdot Mirror
This is another PR statement that inflates the actual findings so much that they become unrecognizable. For those interested in the details, the original article is here (it is paywalled). The TL;DR version of the original article is as follows:
These were the finding of the papers. Now look at the claims in the PR statement:
p-values for individual SNPs range from 5*10^-4 to 9*10^-14. Considering that all of the genome regions they identify are marked by clusters of SNPs that show correlation with intelligence, I would say that their results are statistically significant.
I don't think so. For their SNP (DNA variant) discovery tests they used 12 cohorts tested, depending on the cohort by 8 different measures of intelligence. The cohorts had mean ages from 6 to 62 years. Then they took the genes associated with the DNA variants they discovered and check correlation with various traits - ranging from waist-to-hip ration, through neurological disorders to educational attainment. The strongest positive correlation is with educational attainment. Top negative correlations are with Alzheimer's, depression and ADHD. So they used did not pick individual measures, they actually used all of them and sourced a broad and diverse cohort of people of European discent. Then they validated their results using and orthogonal test, that did not depend on the variables used for the DNA variant discovery. This is exactly the opposite of p-hacking. Yeah and to comments up in the discussion, the study say nothing about race. They clearly state in their methods that they used individuals of European origin. So these genes are associated with intelligence in Europeans. The genes affecting intelligence in other races and populations may or may not be the same.
Here is footage of the Maine legislature writing the law in question.
I call bullshit on this one. There is no way you can actually watch cable TV and not know what a commercial is. Even with a DVR you'll still see them.
Keep in mind that we are talking about kids under ten. If nobody explained to them what a commercial is it is very likely that they see it as normal TV show.
38% of kids in regular television homes don't know what commercials are
. I am sure these kids will grow up and learn what a commercial is, but considering the amount of commercial on American TV it is hard to believe that they have not been heavily exposed to those.
Why is this bullshit moded "interesting"? US unemployment has been steadily declining for the past 7 year of the Obama administration, after the previous "business friendly" president completely fucked up the economy by refusing to regulate the banking sector. Obama's "economically toxic" policies seem to have been very good for the economy. I hope you don't think sticking a label will make us ignore the facts. Most of the slashdot crowd is not that stupid. Please do not offend us with you idiocy.
You miss the point. Obama through ACA (obamacare) helped the miners by increasing their healthcare benefits and providing the families of deceased miners with benefits. They hated him with passion in return, now they stand to lose those benefits. They are decent hard working people, but this doesn't change the fact they have been brainwashed to absurd levels and because of that every choice they make ends up hurting them. There is no future for coal and not because Obama hates miners, but because it is no longer economical, even with the subsidies and underhand tricks that are being played out. It cannot sustain the Appalachian region economy. Yet most people in the region consistently vote for representatives that promise them to bring back the old coal jobs. They even elected Jim Justice for governor of West Virginia. This is the guy whose mines repeatedly placed miners lives at risk by skirting safety regulations. Then he screwed them again by not paying millions in fines, local taxes and severance fees.
What about it? This is a problem that has both modern and very old solutions. Long time ago when nuclear was generating excess power at night when demand is low, people made pumping hydroelectric plants. They used excess power to pump water uphill during the night and reversed the flow to generate power during peak hours. With solar they will pump water during the day and generate power during the night. We have thermal solar power plants that can store heat in molten salt for night time generation. We have utility size batteries that can store power for night time use.
You seem to forget that solar is not the only renewable. We also have wind which is as competitive as solar. While the sun doesn't shine at night, the wind keeps blowing.
As we use less power during the night we need to generate less, so photo voltaic solar plants coming offline during the night can be compensated by storage, wind and hydro. And I would love if we maintain and develop nuclear power for baseline generation. Unfortunately this is getting more and more expensive.
Sure. Care to provide example of the proverbial "other foot"?
But do her toilets work?
Depends, on how evil we are going to make them.
If we send 1000 people to Mars how exactly are we going to feed them? I have heard enough about spaceships, engines, fuel and robots. Has anybody done some thinking on the steaks and the veggies?
If there is a clause in the user agreement that they own all user generated content, then these are their posts and they should be liable.
You mean to say that Microsoft has had cancer solved for years? Why didn't hey tell us? That's cruel.
... machine learning is the solution. And cancer is not "like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells". That is how an actual virus works, hence the analogy by which the "computer virus" term came to be. Cancer is more like when a bit randomly flips in RAM and then by pure coincidence this causes a memory leak within an infinite loop that spreads shit all over the place until everything comes crashing down.
Any any case, this case will shake up the legal situation and set things vibrating!
You can expect some tingling legal issues arousing in the near future that are sure to give us all satisfaction.
What I wonder after reading this sorry story is: was Holmes aware that she was selling snake oil all along, or did she start out with the genuinely belief that her company could make the technology work? I'm willing to believe the latter: they did try, but the longer their breakthrough failed to materialize, the more they had to shift their efforts towards keeping up appearances, or "controlling the narrative" as it's called.
Holmes new the technology cannot possibly work. According to the articles I have read on the topic (including the one in Vanity Fair) she was told so directly by her professors at Stanford when she approached them with the startup idea. Her chief scientist was telling her that the thing is not working. What did she do? She stuffed her board with people who new nothing about biology, chemistry or engineering. The job of her second in command at the company was exclusively to suppress information leaking out. So yes, she new what she was doing: scamming people out of their money.
The VF article also tells a disturbing story how friends and political connections of her father basically propped up the company, gave it legitimacy and suppressed inquiry through legal threats (David Boies) and by using their commanding position in the military (Gen. James Mattis).
Eradicating an abundant species that is in the middle of a food chain tends to impact the food chain above it. Anything that feeds on mosquitoes or their larvae, as well as any animal that feeds on the animals that eat mosquitoes may be impacted. It will also depend on the specific ecosystem where the mosquitoes are being eliminated. Tropical forests with their diversity of insects will be less affected (although highly specialized species like Gambia fish will go the way of the Dodo bird without mosquitoes). Tundra ecosystems where mosquitoes are large chunk of the insect biomass will be hit harder. You can also have effects that are hard to anticipate. For example, caribou migration routes are effected by mosquitoes (caribous like us tend to avoid being attacked by large swarms of insects). This in turn affects where lichens are being eaten and where caribous fertilize the soil with their dung. It may sound as cliche, but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and we have very compelling evidence that pathogens, including the ones spread by mosquitoes, affect the evolution of their hosts. On the other hand, what are the chances that wiping out couple of the hundreds of mosquito species will have a major long lasting impact? All the consequences and their impact are hard to predict, but easy to verify once they happen (at least the short term ones). The best approach would be to eliminate locally mosquitoes in various environments and measure the effect on the ecosystem. If nothing bad happens than let's scale up and eliminate more of them (yeah I know, humanity's ability to agree on long term systematic approach and execute it to completion is not one of its strengths). For a while we will not have to scratch ourselves, then some other bug will fill the niche (blood is too tasty and filling meal, to be left wandering around).
Because of Hillary we are going to have president Trump. Reading through the articles it appears that her defense boils down to her being complete moron. She has hard time recalling anything (really she did not recall training, there must be a paper record if she took it), and she thought the common prefix for classified paragraphs, "(C)", was indicating alphabetized order (seems her version of the English alphabet consists of a single C letter repeated over and over again).
Klug, who was described by friends as a kind and caring man, worked diligently to help Sarkar finish his dissertation and graduate, even though the quality of Sarkar’s work was not stellar, one source said. “Bill was extremely generous to this student, who was a subpar student,” the person said.
Passing code and data from one student to another is a normal and common practice that ensures continuity of the project, reproducibility of the research, etc. This guy is clearly nuts.
I was just dealing with the fallout of a forced win7 to win10 upgrade. Windows 10 is more resource hungry - particularly RAM. The recommended 2GB are a joke. You need 6GB for it to feel usable. It also lacks drivers for ubiquitous hardware modules that are not that fresh. In my case it was NVIDIA G210M card with hybrid engine - this is the setup where the laptop switches between discrete and integrated graphics, depending on the power state. The lack of support was something I could live with - just use the old windows 7 driver. Except I can't, because updates are now mandatory and automatic. Windows 10 insists on updating to the latest and greatest nvidia driver, which fails causing the OS to use the default VGA driver and produce grotesquely distorted picture. So buying new PC with windows 10 is ok. Upgrading an old system, particularly a laptop may be very frustrating. Failed updates sometimes result in unbootable system, which in my case could only be fixed with clean install. Did I mention that you have no control over the updates??? The come the privacy issues, which are discussed at length by others.
And also time to start thinking about what to do when most jobs are done by robots (owned by rich people or corporations) and almost everyone is unemployed.
Exactly that! There is no cost to labor that is low enough to make it competitive with modern day automation. Talking heads that say minimum wage rises are making companies to switch to automation, don't know what they are talking about (TFA shows that quite well). Sure strawberry picking may still be a human domain, but for how long? Even if human labor was free, it will be hard press to compete with the consistency and productivity that automation brings. So yes, it is time to think how a society will function when most people will not have jobs. What would happen to such society if labor is the only source of income and jobless people are being talked down?
Google definitely has the right idea with Project Fi. Project Fi alone can make you buy into their android ecosystem. I have been using it for a few months. It truly shines when traveling abroad. For the first time in my life I feel like I have a real mobile device. I no longer need to swap sim cards or pay roaming (especially data roaming!). The other killer feature are the seamless wifi call integration. Helps a lot in area with poor wireless coverage (my home). It is beyond me why Apple will discard the idea so lightly. They are facing stiff competition both in the device and multimedia business. Integrating the network into their ecosystem is not a bad way to grow their business and increase the value of their current offerings.
Self driving cars reduce congestion the same way food reduces obesity. What helps with congestion is adding lanes (good luck with that in SF) or reducing the number of cars on the road (very unamerican). The best practical solutions to congestion are: 1. large capacity public transport that stays off the roads (aka trains); 2. Integrated business and living areas cities, so you don't need to drive to get a carton of milk and if possible walk/bike to work.