In a perfect world, healthcare would be free. Because funding for healthcare is limited (UK: something like 9% of GDP) you then have to decide how to spend it in the fairest way you can. This means making hard decisions, like "We can medicate your condition for £10 000 per year, and can cure it for £1 000 000. Curing you means that 99 people this year would go untreated, so we'll have to give you medication instead." If the alternative is dying because your condition isn't covered by your health insurance, I'll take the medication!
Here in the UK there's a Government body, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, which makes judgements on how cost-effective treatments are. According to their website if it costs more than £20 000 - £30 000 to provide an extra year of healthy life, then the treatment is likely to be held not to be cost-effective and won't be offered via the National Health System.
Before anyone piles in, it's a bit more complicated than that (different parts of the UK follow different rules, for instance) but that's the essence of it. Private insurance of course isn't affected.
For the GP - here's a list of links to data. This includes the raw data, processed data, models, model source code, data visualisations and links to larger repositories of links and data.
On the subject of CO2 increasing plant growth, it does. A bit. And then you run into the problems of other limiting factors like the increasing acidity of the water, nutrient availability, etc, etc. It also doesn't increase yields in C4 plants (like sorghum, maize and millet) because they already concentrate CO2 inside their leaves. The Green Revolution accounted for almost all of the rise in agricultural production - rising CO2 levels might have contributed 1-2% but that's it. Have you been watching We Call It Life by the Competitive Enterprise Institute?
Also, when you say "outright ban on DDT" it's important to note that bans on DDT were only enacted by individual countries (e.g. the USA in the 1970s) and were a response to the widespread industrial use of DDT to control crop pests rather than the targetted healthcare use of DDT to control mosquitoes when countries feared that insect populations would develop resistance (as they did in Sri Lanka in the 1960s). The UN wants to ban it by 2020 (and is facing some stiff opposition from doctors and NGOs), but the WHO supports spraying it inside houses, for instance.
"While the newspaper suggests that the findings are directly relevant to children’s health, this was not investigated by the researchers, though they did suggest their results may have some application in the management of inflammatory skin disorders."
"This laboratory study... investigated whether chemicals produced by the bacteria Staphylococcus epidermidis could inhibit skin inflammation."
"The researchers state that finding out how such bacteria exist on the skin without causing inflammatory responses could help them understand whether these bacteria have a role in immune responses in general"
So it looks like we can't really draw any conclusions based on this, though it sounds logical that exposure to all sorts of bacteria will keep your immune system focussed on the task in hand rather than (e.g.) psoriasis. As is so often the way, the Swedish are way ahead of us: "In a typical Danish Forest School, young children from 3 years are taken into the forest for 4 hours each day of the week."
Looking at the Wikipedia article, both your examples involve vertebrates, which are definitely a bad idea (it also mentions the introduction of mongooses to Hawaii). Biological pest control using e.g. insects, or fungi targetting the undesirable species can work very effectively if research is put in to make sure that the native species won't be affected.
I'd like to steer people in the direction of this post by AP Gaylard which talks about Kuhn's ideas on anomalous results and why resistance to new ideas is a vital part of science. Forcing proponents of a new hypothesis to make strong arguments for it in the face of something that works to the best of our existing knowledge is a good thing. I've excerpted some of it below:
A Kuhnian Checklist
Remember that resistance is to be expected, irrespective of the merits of the anomaly: it is not evidence for either the defence or prosecution.
Resistance is necessary: if too many scientists became anomaly chasers progress would be limited; if all scientists became anomaly chasers science would judder to a halt. It also ensures that only the most meaningful anomalies are taken into the body of scientific knowledge.
Science always works in the presence of some anomalies which are usually resolved; the presence of anomalies is not a predictor of impending revolution.
Progress is not inhibited by the values of science: normal science, for all its conservatism, is an excellent discoverer of anomalies. Kuhn remarked at "...the completeness with which that traditional pursuit prepares the way for its own change..." [p.65]
Don't get too excited too soon, normal science is also an excellent tool for resolving anomalies: "...most anomalies are resolved by normal means; most proposals for new theories do prove to be wrong..." [p.186]
It's not pursuing an anomaly that turns a scientist into a pseudo-scientist or a crank: it's the abandonment for scientific values.
Most importantly, worthwhile anomalies are born from the pursuit of detail and precision in the observation-theory match: not sloppiness.
I'm finding it difficult to remember where I saw it, but I was struck by reading that "one way a crank can be distinguished from a genius is that a genius knows and appreciates the theories that are generally accepted today, but the crank ignores or derides them".
Making weaponised biotoxins/nerve agents is very very difficult in practice: Aum Shinrikyo used sarin gas, but "Sarin's low vapor pressure (2.9mmHg) and high boiling point makes it difficult to vaporize at ambient temperature, so very little evaporated to become an inhalant hazard. Sarin evaporates nearly 10 times more slowly than water" so it's actually rather difficult to weaponise *in practice*. This article by John Lettice in The Register is also very informative on the kind of obstacles that present themselves when you're trying to create and weaponise highly toxic substances on a budget and covertly. The answer is not to try and stuff the genie back in the bottle (samizdat, anyone?) but to have effective law enforcement and emergency services which will counter any threat.
Actually, I feel slightly embarrassed about that last comment - having read the article, the Daily Mail *aren't* making grandiose statements, and emphasise several times that any treatments will be a couple of years away. This article seems pretty sensible, and looking at some other stuff the journalist in question has written it looks like he's not usually overhyping medical research. Just goes to say you always have to dig deeper than surface appearance!
Er, the Daily Mail is a bad choice of news outlet if you want accurate science reporting - it's well known for sensationalist stories of every kind, and has a bad track record in hyping medical research. Recently, they were uncritically quoting an 'expert' saying that autism is caused by (undefined) toxins, and they're a regular presence in Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, like in this article.
Well, you have a point for.com (or.co.uk etc) names - but what about.org? PIR promotes itself as a public interest registrar, but allows domain name squatting freely, which seems counter to its aspiration here that "Through the registry for.ORG, your organization is linked to a well-established brand of trust and integrity".
Please also make the distinction between the editorial and the reporting parts of the WSJ - they're entirely separate operations and sometimes disagree fundamentally, e.g. on climate change.
Er, that would be because natural selection makes a mosquito population DDT-resistant if it's overused. Hence, long-term malaria prevention with insecticides relies on things like supplying impregnated bednets and regulating their use in agriculture. The World Bank and World Health Organisation (for example) fund this kind of spraying with DDT.
In any case, offering extremely expensive anti-malarial drugs would make you no money at all, because almost all the victims couldn't afford to buy them. Selling them cheaply in Ghana, and trying to charge more for them in Singapore is what manufacturers actually do.
That reminds me of this rather interesting document: basically, the US Army decides to ban Myspace, but not Facebook. Who uses Myspace? The grunts. Who uses Facebook? The officers....
No. Though the headmaster at the school I went to was supposed to have kept an air-rifle in his study expressly for shooting the grey ones, it was always assumed that he threw any dead squirrels into the dustbin, that being what anyone would always do.
No, he has trust in the system because of oversight. In the case of paper ballots in the UK, there are many experienced people of different political parties involved in counting the votes, and actual boxes of ballots that must be stuffed and the contents of the old boxes got rid of; in the case of the machine there's just one official to load the programme, and an electronic audit trail that can be rewritten.
Actually, you might be interested to know that in the 2008 International Wine and Spirit competition, an English sparkling wine came away with a Gold Medal, and almost all of the English entries won awards. This particular invention is undoubtedly high-priced bullshit which works because of its psychological impact, though - let's see a proper double-blind study first!
Sorry, it wasn't: it was pretty speculative, and it got a little press, but that was all (see here). It was a briefly interesting theory at the time, and it's important to understand what causes ice ages, but the evidence shows that what's happening now is global warming.
Yes, the Ars Technica article states that a particular transcription gets 1 point every time it's made by a human, and 0.5 points when made by a computer. If it gets to 2.5 points, it's accepted - this approach gets you 99% accuracy, which compares well to professional transcription agencies.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a longstanding decadent Western invention, though:
Dicitur vulgariter "ut rex vult, lex vadit;"
Veritas vult aliter, nam lex stat, rex cadit.
(The Song of Lewes, 1264)
[Commonly it is said, "as the king wishes, so goes the law;"
The truth is quite otherwise, for the law stands, though the king falls."]
In a perfect world, healthcare would be free. Because funding for healthcare is limited (UK: something like 9% of GDP) you then have to decide how to spend it in the fairest way you can. This means making hard decisions, like "We can medicate your condition for £10 000 per year, and can cure it for £1 000 000. Curing you means that 99 people this year would go untreated, so we'll have to give you medication instead." If the alternative is dying because your condition isn't covered by your health insurance, I'll take the medication!
Here in the UK there's a Government body, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, which makes judgements on how cost-effective treatments are. According to their website if it costs more than £20 000 - £30 000 to provide an extra year of healthy life, then the treatment is likely to be held not to be cost-effective and won't be offered via the National Health System.
Before anyone piles in, it's a bit more complicated than that (different parts of the UK follow different rules, for instance) but that's the essence of it. Private insurance of course isn't affected.
"Calvin grows up" seems to be a whole genre of parody/fanart - see here for some examples.
If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. -- John Paul Getty (according to here)
For the GP - here's a list of links to data. This includes the raw data, processed data, models, model source code, data visualisations and links to larger repositories of links and data.
On the subject of CO2 increasing plant growth, it does. A bit. And then you run into the problems of other limiting factors like the increasing acidity of the water, nutrient availability, etc, etc. It also doesn't increase yields in C4 plants (like sorghum, maize and millet) because they already concentrate CO2 inside their leaves. The Green Revolution accounted for almost all of the rise in agricultural production - rising CO2 levels might have contributed 1-2% but that's it. Have you been watching We Call It Life by the Competitive Enterprise Institute?
Also, when you say "outright ban on DDT" it's important to note that bans on DDT were only enacted by individual countries (e.g. the USA in the 1970s) and were a response to the widespread industrial use of DDT to control crop pests rather than the targetted healthcare use of DDT to control mosquitoes when countries feared that insect populations would develop resistance (as they did in Sri Lanka in the 1960s). The UN wants to ban it by 2020 (and is facing some stiff opposition from doctors and NGOs), but the WHO supports spraying it inside houses, for instance.
Actually, the research was done on mice and cultured skin cells. Choice quotes from the NHS Choices article which discusses and links to the actual research:
So it looks like we can't really draw any conclusions based on this, though it sounds logical that exposure to all sorts of bacteria will keep your immune system focussed on the task in hand rather than (e.g.) psoriasis. As is so often the way, the Swedish are way ahead of us: "In a typical Danish Forest School, young children from 3 years are taken into the forest for 4 hours each day of the week."
Looking at the Wikipedia article, both your examples involve vertebrates, which are definitely a bad idea (it also mentions the introduction of mongooses to Hawaii). Biological pest control using e.g. insects, or fungi targetting the undesirable species can work very effectively if research is put in to make sure that the native species won't be affected.
I'm finding it difficult to remember where I saw it, but I was struck by reading that "one way a crank can be distinguished from a genius is that a genius knows and appreciates the theories that are generally accepted today, but the crank ignores or derides them".
Making weaponised biotoxins/nerve agents is very very difficult in practice: Aum Shinrikyo used sarin gas, but "Sarin's low vapor pressure (2.9mmHg) and high boiling point makes it difficult to vaporize at ambient temperature, so very little evaporated to become an inhalant hazard. Sarin evaporates nearly 10 times more slowly than water" so it's actually rather difficult to weaponise *in practice*. This article by John Lettice in The Register is also very informative on the kind of obstacles that present themselves when you're trying to create and weaponise highly toxic substances on a budget and covertly. The answer is not to try and stuff the genie back in the bottle (samizdat, anyone?) but to have effective law enforcement and emergency services which will counter any threat.
Actually, I feel slightly embarrassed about that last comment - having read the article, the Daily Mail *aren't* making grandiose statements, and emphasise several times that any treatments will be a couple of years away. This article seems pretty sensible, and looking at some other stuff the journalist in question has written it looks like he's not usually overhyping medical research. Just goes to say you always have to dig deeper than surface appearance!
Er, the Daily Mail is a bad choice of news outlet if you want accurate science reporting - it's well known for sensationalist stories of every kind, and has a bad track record in hyping medical research. Recently, they were uncritically quoting an 'expert' saying that autism is caused by (undefined) toxins, and they're a regular presence in Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, like in this article.
Well, you have a point for .com (or .co.uk etc) names - but what about .org? PIR promotes itself as a public interest registrar, but allows domain name squatting freely, which seems counter to its aspiration here that "Through the registry for .ORG, your organization is linked to a well-established brand of trust and integrity".
Could be a task for Amazon's Mechanical Berk.
On the subject of lists, check out http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/petitions.html - the rolls of the sceptical petitions are full of emeritus professors and non-climate-scientists. His list of scientists with publicly expressed views or participation in climate science is at http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/climate_authors_table.html and also makes interesting reading.
"The Chicago School say that Gov't Won't Help"
Please also make the distinction between the editorial and the reporting parts of the WSJ - they're entirely separate operations and sometimes disagree fundamentally, e.g. on climate change.
Er, that would be because natural selection makes a mosquito population DDT-resistant if it's overused. Hence, long-term malaria prevention with insecticides relies on things like supplying impregnated bednets and regulating their use in agriculture. The World Bank and World Health Organisation (for example) fund this kind of spraying with DDT. In any case, offering extremely expensive anti-malarial drugs would make you no money at all, because almost all the victims couldn't afford to buy them. Selling them cheaply in Ghana, and trying to charge more for them in Singapore is what manufacturers actually do.
That reminds me of this rather interesting document: basically, the US Army decides to ban Myspace, but not Facebook. Who uses Myspace? The grunts. Who uses Facebook? The officers....
No. Though the headmaster at the school I went to was supposed to have kept an air-rifle in his study expressly for shooting the grey ones, it was always assumed that he threw any dead squirrels into the dustbin, that being what anyone would always do.
For those who haven't read any Jasper Fforde, see here. A very suitable Christmas gift for the literary geek in your life.
No, he has trust in the system because of oversight. In the case of paper ballots in the UK, there are many experienced people of different political parties involved in counting the votes, and actual boxes of ballots that must be stuffed and the contents of the old boxes got rid of; in the case of the machine there's just one official to load the programme, and an electronic audit trail that can be rewritten.
Actually, you might be interested to know that in the 2008 International Wine and Spirit competition, an English sparkling wine came away with a Gold Medal, and almost all of the English entries won awards. This particular invention is undoubtedly high-priced bullshit which works because of its psychological impact, though - let's see a proper double-blind study first!
Sorry, it wasn't: it was pretty speculative, and it got a little press, but that was all (see here). It was a briefly interesting theory at the time, and it's important to understand what causes ice ages, but the evidence shows that what's happening now is global warming.
Yes, the Ars Technica article states that a particular transcription gets 1 point every time it's made by a human, and 0.5 points when made by a computer. If it gets to 2.5 points, it's accepted - this approach gets you 99% accuracy, which compares well to professional transcription agencies.