Actual AIM transcript from convo I just had (names changed to protect the unpopular):
3:04 PM [him]: http://aimfight.com/ [him]: i challenge u 3:05 PM [me]: hahah...ok, what is this? [me]: im putting in our names [me]: what happened?! [me]: i lost?! [him]: u lose buddy [me]: why?! [me]: i must train harder! [him]: i'm moving on , 3 down [me]: i was sucker punched! [him]: read the faq , it's cool 3:10 PM [me]: haha...so, basically, it's a popularity contest. [him]: yep [me]: well, shit dude, i could've TOLD you i'm not cool. you didnt have to smack my ass to find that out. [him]: lol [him]: i'm an empiricist [him]: what can i say
When you take the groundbreaking physics of a novel force field projector, and jam it up yer ass just to get a trailing wall of impenetrable light shooting out yer anus, you better believe it's a hack!
Oof. Buddhism was a bad automatic example. Buddhism is actually, strictly speaking, the largest non-theistic religion, although with some sects thats debatable.
Maybe you should get the terminology right. They were deists, not deitists. And a deist is a theist. Theism is a Greek-derived word which means belief in the existence of a supreme being (or beings). Deism is a Latin-derived word which refers to a particular school of religious thought (I don't know if I'd characterize it as a religion as much as a theological philosophy).
So, deists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, etc., are all members of the set theists.
Insert joke about the 1980's (or 60's/50's/40's) calling). Somehow I don't think Norbert Weiner would be the slightest bit surprised.
No kidding. And as it pertains to psychology, neither would Rumelhart and McClelland. The modular vs. graded processing debate has been raging since at least the early 80s in psychology. Some folks (Jerry Fodor comes to mind)have not given up the modularity cause, but it's a pretty limitedly useful account at best with what we know about cognitive processing these days.
- UMS and iTunes Music Manager support are mutually exclusive, and UMS seems to be a little slower. - No support for song alphabetization. This is very unpractical if you're using UMS, and can't manually change the file ordering.
Well, that sucks. WHERE oh WHERE is the flash mp3 player that supports playlists? I do not understand why, especially with flash capacities growing, this is not a given. If I am storing a good chunk of mp3s on my player, I do not want to have arrange them awkwardly into folders, and wonder if they'll be sorted in the order added, alphabetically by song name, or alphabetically by filename or what. I shouldn't have to change the organization scheme I have on my HD (iTunes style, artist folder, album subfolder) just so I can move them to my player. The HD players (especially the iPods, beside the shuffle) do this well, but they're not flash, and don't have radio, and don't have recording. Anyone know a good, multi-featured flash player with playlist support? iAudio promises it with the U2, but they haven't breathed a word about it in months.
This work would not be published if the results were not statistically reliable. The point of my post was that first, an N of 29 is pretty common for this sort of study, and second, even with the crudest back-of-the-envelope stats they have a pretty convincing trend. I am sure the real data are much better.
Theory, btw, does not confirm data. Data confirms theory. And there is, nevertheless, a lot theory as well as data regarding oxytocin's effects on stimulating maternal instincts, empathy, and affection. This trust angle is new.
Replication is always necessary to make a finding fact, but I would not dismiss this work out of hand.
Re:Too Small of a Test
on
Trust in a Bottle
·
· Score: 3, Informative
What mean? Mean of what? 29 people is plenty of subjects for a reliable statistical test. The t distribution is about equivalent to the normal distribution at about 30 samples. 30 samples is about the usual rule of thumb for adequate power for a cell in a behavioral experiment. But, you know, it really depends on the effect size of whatever you're studying.
Anyway, the right test to do here, just from the tiny snippet of info we're given about the study is a chi square test. According to TFA, a subject could invest 0, 4, 8, or 12 credits. If we assume that we would expect a uniform distribution of investment across these levels (and I don't know if that's a fair distrubtion to assume, perhaps normal is better--you'd expect more people to invest middle amounts than extremes, perhaps), then we expect 7.25 people to fall in each of the 4 cells. For just the oxytocin condition, they report 13 people invested 12 credits. Let's assume that the remaining 16 subjects were evenly distributed among the 0, 4. and 8 investment levels. That means 5 1/3 people in each of those cells. With those data, the chi square test gives you a p value of.11 (Chi sqaure score of 6.08), which means a less than 11% chance of getting these results just by chance. That's not exactly meeting the 5% standard alpha level for significance, but then again, I've made some horrible simplifying assumptions that stack the deck against significance. Besides my made up data, I'm sure there's a repeated measures component to this study...I doubt each subject had to only make ONE investment decision in the whole experiment. The repeated measures would lend a lot more power.
If Bush didn't surround himself with yes-men by packing his cabinet with cronies and like-minded ideologues, perhaps there would be a meaningful distinction between "Justice Dept." and "Bush Administration." But as it is, there is not.
I didn't call Republicans racist, I called the current Republican agenda socially conservative. And social conservativism is what banded together anti-Kennedy Republicans and Dixiecrats in the 60s, and, in part, precipitated the filibuster of Fortas in 68.
Such historical comparisons are meaningful, because changing labels doesn't change stripes. Apropos of this thread on filibustering, the record for the longest individual speech goes to Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Bzzzt! Sorry, no points. I asked for a judge that the REPUBLICANS had fillibustered. Abe Fortras, Johnson's buddy who helped him rig the 1948 Texas Senate election, was fillibustered by BOTH parties
He was filibustered by Republicans and Dixiecrats for his progressive rulings on race and due process. I'm sorry, is there a modern distinction between Republicans and the now-defunct Dixiecrats? No. And given the social agenda that underlies current Republican judicial aspirations, this is especially poignant.
There are a number of other judicial nominees filibustered by Republicans, it's just that cloture was voted. Here's a very nice column on the matter. But I'll reproduce the heart of it here. Note especially the closing quote.
-------- Traditionally, the filibuster has not been the only weapon in an opposition party's arsenal. There are other, less visible ways whereby the Senate's rules and traditions empower individual senators to block judicial and other nominations. Between 1996 and 2000, Republicans in control of the Senate developed these techniques to a high art.
Prior to 1996, when the Senate majority and the president were from opposing parties, senators usually deferred to the president with respect to lower-court judicial nominations. With the notable exceptions of the 1968 Fortas nomination and a failed Republican filibuster of H. Lee Sarokin in 1994, neither party filibustered the other's judicial nominations, and virtually all nominees received a hearing unless they were sent up after the presidential nominating conventions.
All this changed in 1996. Rather than openly challenge President Clinton's nominees on the floor, Republicans decided to deny them Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. Between 1996 and 2000, 20 of Bill Clinton's appeals-court nominees were denied hearings, including Elena Kagan, now dean of the Harvard Law School, and many other women and minorities. In 1999, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch refused to hold hearings for almost six months on any of 16 circuit-court and 31 district-court nominations Clinton had sent up. Three appeals-court nominees who did manage to obtain a hearing in Clinton's second term were denied a committee vote, including Allen R. Snyder, a distinguished Washington lawyer, Clinton White House aide, and former Rehnquist law clerk, who drew lavish praise at his hearing -- but never got a committee vote. Some 45 district-court nominees were also denied hearings, and two more were afforded hearings but not a committee vote.
Even votes that did occur were often delayed for months and even years. In late 1999, New Hampshire Republican Bob Smith blocked a vote on 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Richard Paez for months by putting an anonymous hold on the nomination. When Majority Leader Trent Lott could no longer preserve the hold, Smith and 13 other Republicans tried to mount a filibuster against the vote, but cloture was voted and Paez easily confirmed. It had been over four years since his nomination.
When his tactics on the Paez and Marsha Berzon nominations (Berzon was filibustered along with Paez, more than two years after her nomination) were challenged, Smith responded with an impassioned floor speech in defense of the judicial filibuster: "Don't pontificate on the floor of the Senate and tell me that somehow I am violating the Constitution of the United States of America by blocking a judge or filibustering a judge that I don't think deserves to be on the circuit court... . That is my responsibility. That is my advice and consent role, and I intend to exercise it."
How the commentary significantly different from the commentary here, other than in the politics it favors?
Well, I'll tell ya: The parent post you refer to made a reasonable and truthful point that Democrats did not originiate, nor do they have a monopoly on, blocking judicial nominees. This is true. The "troll" response post made the outlandish and ignorant claim that Democrats "sure as heck have coined the idea of fillibustering nominations to avoid a vote." That's just a falsehood. The Republicans fillibustered nominations under Clinton, and earlier Democrat presidents, the same as the Dems are doing now. This is just another weapon in the Senate arsenal, and it only peeves those who are on the receiving end. It's a trade off for having the most "deliberative body in the free world" whose mission, as Madison envisioned it, was to guard the interests of the minority from being overrun by pure popularity. A hedge against the more overtly popular House.
Hmm, see I always thought a "Driver's License" was a document that established that you have a license to drive. The fact that it has been co-opted to be some form of state identity establishing device doesn't make it right that now the government is further co-opting it to produce some federal identity establishing device. This drift toward depersonalizing people into (corruptible, opaque) database entries is not the way to sustain an open, free society. I don't understand why the rightists who bemoan the collapse of our "culture" all around them fail to see this most fundamental cornerstone crumbling under their own power and paranoia.
While I won't comment on the irony of this post coming from someone named "133t-somethingorother," I agree with you completely. I'm kind of "older" for the IM crowd (early 30s), and in general, I find it absolutely infuriating. It's the most impoverished mode of communication i've ever experienced. All the absence of conversational pragmatics normally present in speech, and none of the well-formed ideas of writing. Email, while it may be half-duplex, at least has the advantage that a single message is intended as an independent "bolus" of information. Somebody has a thought or inquiry that they send to you and you can grok it without immediate interaction. They may want a response quickly, but they're not gauging your emotional reaction by the speed of your response, unlike in conversation. IM screws all of that up. How many times have I been IM'ing someone, and make some pithy, funny, or purposely inciting remark, only to hear the virtual Muzak playing while there's some sudden delay. We used to call it "rhythm springing" when I was a kid, when you'd be on the phone with a bud, mid-story, and call waiting would interrupt. Here, you have the added bonus of not knowing what the hell is going on. Younger people (like early 20s) that I IM with at work seem to be more OK with this disjoint nature. To me it's incredibly rude and exasperating not to know if you're "engaged" in a conversation or not. IM swings wildly between just a virtual bulletin board for private messages that you get to whenever you can (much like email) and a real-time conversation without much warning. Older IMers I find at least have the decency to say "hold on" or "on the phone" or "someone here" to give you a cue, whereas younger follks seem to have developed a convention where it's cool to just leave people hanging. I dunno. Maybe I IM with jerks.
So in addition to the very good point you make that you can't convey tone-of-voice (more important in a real-time conversation than an email), even conversational timing is all bollocksed in IM.
It's all the rage and fashion now to ascribe to fundamentalists some sort of lock-step mindless adherence to bizarre beliefs.
Yes, it's all the rage and fashion now to ascribe to a word the very meaning it is defined by.
Denotation. All the kids are doin' it.
Why is it that prejudice against Christians is the last remaining acceptable prejudice?
This is among the more hilarious statements I've read on Slashdot. Unlike conspiracy theories alleging otherwise, uhm, who is in control of the government (all three branches thereof), and just about every major corporation? Oh yeah, Christians.
What is all the "fashion and rage" in fact, is appeasing the Christian right, what with the sudden general outrage against gay marriage, stem cells n' abortions, heathenous evolution, and boobies. Suddenly our very upright and moral members of Congress feel the best use of the might and power of the legislative branch of government is to spank the naughty boys of baseball and turn a doomed woman's life into a political football. Cuz it all plays well with the God-fearin' folk.
Early 1920s temperance movement, 1950s McCarthyism, 1980s Moral Majority, and now the post-9/11-"red state-ism." Every 30 years or so we get all high-n-mighty and take a giant step back for mankind that later proves to be a national embarrassment. Hopefully this one will pass quickly.
1. The used two different painful stimuli: electric shock and heat.
2. I wasn't involved, so I don't know the details of how difficult this was to approve. Naturally this took much more careful exposition to the review board and it received a lot of scrutiny. However, this wasn't as complicated as replacing an oral analgesic with a sugar pill. They used a neutral topical gel (isotonic electrolytic gel) that does nothing. They used some clear gel and some that was dyed, and claimed that the dyed variety contained a novel topical anesthetic whose efficacy they were "testing."
The Hrobjartsson meta-analysis (the story that you ulitmately link to) is intetersting, but in the end it shows that placebo does not resolve people's sysmptoms (it doesn't actually make people get better), which is not surprising, since we know placebo does not actually have any curative powers! They were looking at placebo in disease state, and we know the basis of disease is almost never something can be wished away,even if you believe the placebo is working.
But whether or not the placebo effect actually alters people's perception is another matter, and not one that I'm convinced has been discredited. Some of my colleagues took this seriously and performed a brain imaging study and found that placebo actually changed the way people's brains perceive pain (they examined placebo analgesia) in those people subject to the placebo effect (report less pain with placebo). Namely, people show less activity in pain-related areas and more activity in "control" areas that may be overriding or dampening pain processing. Mind over experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Actual AIM transcript from convo I just had (names changed to protect the unpopular):
3:04 PM
[him]: http://aimfight.com/
[him]: i challenge u
3:05 PM
[me]: hahah...ok, what is this?
[me]: im putting in our names
[me]: what happened?!
[me]: i lost?!
[him]: u lose buddy
[me]: why?!
[me]: i must train harder!
[him]: i'm moving on , 3 down
[me]: i was sucker punched!
[him]: read the faq , it's cool
3:10 PM
[me]: haha...so, basically, it's a popularity contest.
[him]: yep
[me]: well, shit dude, i could've TOLD you i'm not cool. you didnt have to smack my ass to find that out.
[him]: lol
[him]: i'm an empiricist
[him]: what can i say
How many lepers have you avoided this week?
All of 'em.
When you take the groundbreaking physics of a novel force field projector, and jam it up yer ass just to get a trailing wall of impenetrable light shooting out yer anus, you better believe it's a hack!
That is what they did, right?
Maybe I should read TFA...
Why do we always troll here?
I guess we'll never know.
It's like some kind of torture
To try to get first post!
Oof. Buddhism was a bad automatic example. Buddhism is actually, strictly speaking, the largest non-theistic religion, although with some sects thats debatable.
Maybe you should get the terminology right. They were deists, not deitists. And a deist is a theist. Theism is a Greek-derived word which means belief in the existence of a supreme being (or beings). Deism is a Latin-derived word which refers to a particular school of religious thought (I don't know if I'd characterize it as a religion as much as a theological philosophy).
So, deists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, etc., are all members of the set theists.
Insert joke about the 1980's (or 60's/50's/40's) calling). Somehow I don't think Norbert Weiner would be the slightest bit surprised.
No kidding. And as it pertains to psychology, neither would Rumelhart and McClelland. The modular vs. graded processing debate has been raging since at least the early 80s in psychology. Some folks (Jerry Fodor comes to mind)have not given up the modularity cause, but it's a pretty limitedly useful account at best with what we know about cognitive processing these days.
Seriously! And why foist this garbage on the Star Wars (SW) weenies? Has John Williams gone country?
- UMS and iTunes Music Manager support are mutually exclusive, and UMS seems to be a little slower.
- No support for song alphabetization. This is very unpractical if you're using UMS, and can't manually change the file ordering.
Well, that sucks. WHERE oh WHERE is the flash mp3 player that supports playlists? I do not understand why, especially with flash capacities growing, this is not a given. If I am storing a good chunk of mp3s on my player, I do not want to have arrange them awkwardly into folders, and wonder if they'll be sorted in the order added, alphabetically by song name, or alphabetically by filename or what. I shouldn't have to change the organization scheme I have on my HD (iTunes style, artist folder, album subfolder) just so I can move them to my player. The HD players (especially the iPods, beside the shuffle) do this well, but they're not flash, and don't have radio, and don't have recording. Anyone know a good, multi-featured flash player with playlist support? iAudio promises it with the U2, but they haven't breathed a word about it in months.
In reality this makes perfect sense.
Hahahahah. Truly, Friday night Slashdot is the purest form of Slashdot.
This work would not be published if the results were not statistically reliable. The point of my post was that first, an N of 29 is pretty common for this sort of study, and second, even with the crudest back-of-the-envelope stats they have a pretty convincing trend. I am sure the real data are much better.
Theory, btw, does not confirm data. Data confirms theory. And there is, nevertheless, a lot theory as well as data regarding oxytocin's effects on stimulating maternal instincts, empathy, and affection. This trust angle is new.
Replication is always necessary to make a finding fact, but I would not dismiss this work out of hand.
What mean? Mean of what?
.11 (Chi sqaure score of 6.08), which means a less than 11% chance of getting these results just by chance. That's not exactly meeting the 5% standard alpha level for significance, but then again, I've made some horrible simplifying assumptions that stack the deck against significance. Besides my made up data, I'm sure there's a repeated measures component to this study...I doubt each subject had to only make ONE investment decision in the whole experiment. The repeated measures would lend a lot more power.
29 people is plenty of subjects for a reliable statistical test. The t distribution is about equivalent to the normal distribution at about 30 samples. 30 samples is about the usual rule of thumb for adequate power for a cell in a behavioral experiment. But, you know, it really depends on the effect size of whatever you're studying.
Anyway, the right test to do here, just from the tiny snippet of info we're given about the study is a chi square test. According to TFA, a subject could invest 0, 4, 8, or 12 credits. If we assume that we would expect a uniform distribution of investment across these levels (and I don't know if that's a fair distrubtion to assume, perhaps normal is better--you'd expect more people to invest middle amounts than extremes, perhaps), then we expect 7.25 people to fall in each of the 4 cells. For just the oxytocin condition, they report 13 people invested 12 credits. Let's assume that the remaining 16 subjects were evenly distributed among the 0, 4. and 8 investment levels. That means 5 1/3 people in each of those cells. With those data, the chi square test gives you a p value of
If Bush didn't surround himself with yes-men by packing his cabinet with cronies and like-minded ideologues, perhaps there would be a meaningful distinction between "Justice Dept." and "Bush Administration." But as it is, there is not.
I didn't call Republicans racist, I called the current Republican agenda socially conservative. And social conservativism is what banded together anti-Kennedy Republicans and Dixiecrats in the 60s, and, in part, precipitated the filibuster of Fortas in 68.
Such historical comparisons are meaningful, because changing labels doesn't change stripes. Apropos of this thread on filibustering, the record for the longest individual speech goes to Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
I don't think so.
Bzzzt! Sorry, no points. I asked for a judge that the REPUBLICANS had fillibustered. Abe Fortras, Johnson's buddy who helped him rig the 1948 Texas Senate election, was fillibustered by BOTH parties
... . That is my responsibility. That is my advice and consent role, and I intend to exercise it."
He was filibustered by Republicans and Dixiecrats for his progressive rulings on race and due process. I'm sorry, is there a modern distinction between Republicans and the now-defunct Dixiecrats? No. And given the social agenda that underlies current Republican judicial aspirations, this is especially poignant.
There are a number of other judicial nominees filibustered by Republicans, it's just that cloture was voted. Here's a very nice column on the matter. But I'll reproduce the heart of it here. Note especially the closing quote.
--------
Traditionally, the filibuster has not been the only weapon in an opposition party's arsenal. There are other, less visible ways whereby the Senate's rules and traditions empower individual senators to block judicial and other nominations. Between 1996 and 2000, Republicans in control of the Senate developed these techniques to a high art.
Prior to 1996, when the Senate majority and the president were from opposing parties, senators usually deferred to the president with respect to lower-court judicial nominations. With the notable exceptions of the 1968 Fortas nomination and a failed Republican filibuster of H. Lee Sarokin in 1994, neither party filibustered the other's judicial nominations, and virtually all nominees received a hearing unless they were sent up after the presidential nominating conventions.
All this changed in 1996. Rather than openly challenge President Clinton's nominees on the floor, Republicans decided to deny them Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. Between 1996 and 2000, 20 of Bill Clinton's appeals-court nominees were denied hearings, including Elena Kagan, now dean of the Harvard Law School, and many other women and minorities. In 1999, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch refused to hold hearings for almost six months on any of 16 circuit-court and 31 district-court nominations Clinton had sent up. Three appeals-court nominees who did manage to obtain a hearing in Clinton's second term were denied a committee vote, including Allen R. Snyder, a distinguished Washington lawyer, Clinton White House aide, and former Rehnquist law clerk, who drew lavish praise at his hearing -- but never got a committee vote. Some 45 district-court nominees were also denied hearings, and two more were afforded hearings but not a committee vote.
Even votes that did occur were often delayed for months and even years. In late 1999, New Hampshire Republican Bob Smith blocked a vote on 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Richard Paez for months by putting an anonymous hold on the nomination. When Majority Leader Trent Lott could no longer preserve the hold, Smith and 13 other Republicans tried to mount a filibuster against the vote, but cloture was voted and Paez easily confirmed. It had been over four years since his nomination.
When his tactics on the Paez and Marsha Berzon nominations (Berzon was filibustered along with Paez, more than two years after her nomination) were challenged, Smith responded with an impassioned floor speech in defense of the judicial filibuster: "Don't pontificate on the floor of the Senate and tell me that somehow I am violating the Constitution of the United States of America by blocking a judge or filibustering a judge that I don't think deserves to be on the circuit court
Here's one example.
How the commentary significantly different from the commentary here, other than in the politics it favors?
Well, I'll tell ya: The parent post you refer to made a reasonable and truthful point that Democrats did not originiate, nor do they have a monopoly on, blocking judicial nominees. This is true. The "troll" response post made the outlandish and ignorant claim that Democrats "sure as heck have coined the idea of fillibustering nominations to avoid a vote." That's just a falsehood. The Republicans fillibustered nominations under Clinton, and earlier Democrat presidents, the same as the Dems are doing now. This is just another weapon in the Senate arsenal, and it only peeves those who are on the receiving end. It's a trade off for having the most "deliberative body in the free world" whose mission, as Madison envisioned it, was to guard the interests of the minority from being overrun by pure popularity. A hedge against the more overtly popular House.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA...some guy kicks ass of YOU!
(Oh christ, why? The karma, it burns like my shame)
Hmm, see I always thought a "Driver's License" was a document that established that you have a license to drive. The fact that it has been co-opted to be some form of state identity establishing device doesn't make it right that now the government is further co-opting it to produce some federal identity establishing device. This drift toward depersonalizing people into (corruptible, opaque) database entries is not the way to sustain an open, free society. I don't understand why the rightists who bemoan the collapse of our "culture" all around them fail to see this most fundamental cornerstone crumbling under their own power and paranoia.
While I won't comment on the irony of this post coming from someone named "133t-somethingorother,"
I agree with you completely. I'm kind of "older" for the IM crowd (early 30s), and in general, I find it absolutely infuriating. It's the most impoverished mode of communication i've ever experienced. All the absence of conversational pragmatics normally present in speech, and none of the well-formed ideas of writing. Email, while it may be half-duplex, at least has the advantage that a single message is intended as an independent "bolus" of information. Somebody has a thought or inquiry that they send to you and you can grok it without immediate interaction. They may want a response quickly, but they're not gauging your emotional reaction by the speed of your response, unlike in conversation. IM screws all of that up. How many times have I been IM'ing someone, and make some pithy, funny, or purposely inciting remark, only to hear the virtual Muzak playing while there's some sudden delay. We used to call it "rhythm springing" when I was a kid, when you'd be on the phone with a bud, mid-story, and call waiting would interrupt. Here, you have the added bonus of not knowing what the hell is going on. Younger people (like early 20s) that I IM with at work seem to be more OK with this disjoint nature. To me it's incredibly rude and exasperating not to know if you're "engaged" in a conversation or not. IM swings wildly between just a virtual bulletin board for private messages that you get to whenever you can (much like email) and a real-time conversation without much warning. Older IMers I find at least have the decency to say "hold on" or "on the phone" or "someone here" to give you a cue, whereas younger follks seem to have developed a convention where it's cool to just leave people hanging. I dunno. Maybe I IM with jerks.
So in addition to the very good point you make that you can't convey tone-of-voice (more important in a real-time conversation than an email), even conversational timing is all bollocksed in IM.
It's all the rage and fashion now to ascribe to fundamentalists some sort of lock-step mindless adherence to bizarre beliefs.
Yes, it's all the rage and fashion now to ascribe to a word the very meaning it is defined by.
Denotation. All the kids are doin' it.
Why is it that prejudice against Christians is the last remaining acceptable prejudice?
This is among the more hilarious statements I've read on Slashdot. Unlike conspiracy theories alleging otherwise, uhm, who is in control of the government (all three branches thereof), and just about every major corporation? Oh yeah, Christians.
What is all the "fashion and rage" in fact, is appeasing the Christian right, what with the sudden general outrage against gay marriage, stem cells n' abortions, heathenous evolution, and boobies. Suddenly our very upright and moral members of Congress feel the best use of the might and power of the legislative branch of government is to spank the naughty boys of baseball and turn a doomed woman's life into a political football. Cuz it all plays well with the God-fearin' folk.
Early 1920s temperance movement, 1950s McCarthyism, 1980s Moral Majority, and now the post-9/11-"red state-ism." Every 30 years or so we get all high-n-mighty and take a giant step back for mankind that later proves to be a national embarrassment. Hopefully this one will pass quickly.
1. The used two different painful stimuli: electric shock and heat.
2. I wasn't involved, so I don't know the details of how difficult this was to approve. Naturally this took much more careful exposition to the review board and it received a lot of scrutiny. However, this wasn't as complicated as replacing an oral analgesic with a sugar pill. They used a neutral topical gel (isotonic electrolytic gel) that does nothing. They used some clear gel and some that was dyed, and claimed that the dyed variety contained a novel topical anesthetic whose efficacy they were "testing."
The Hrobjartsson meta-analysis (the story that you ulitmately link to) is intetersting, but in the end it shows that placebo does not resolve people's sysmptoms (it doesn't actually make people get better), which is not surprising, since we know placebo does not actually have any curative powers! They were looking at placebo in disease state, and we know the basis of disease is almost never something can be wished away,even if you believe the placebo is working.
But whether or not the placebo effect actually alters people's perception is another matter, and not one that I'm convinced has been discredited. Some of my colleagues took this seriously and performed a brain imaging study and found that placebo actually changed the way people's brains perceive pain (they examined placebo analgesia) in those people subject to the placebo effect (report less pain with placebo). Namely, people show less activity in pain-related areas and more activity in "control" areas that may be overriding or dampening pain processing. Mind over experience.
Maybe OCD maybe not, but probably a little Aspergerish. Many (maybe most?) of the geniuses in CS and mathematics are.