Mathematics meets real life
gowers.wordpress.com
gowers.wordpress.com
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/a-trip-to-watford-gra...
this is class stuff. I shall try the airport shoelace tying problem out on my motley crews next week.
Gerd Gigerenzer has a nice book, Reckoning with Risk (or Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You in the US), in which he calls for people to stop using percentages and to use natural numbers numbers instead.
When you say that someone's risk has increased by 33% they usually have no idea what that means, but they think it's scary. But if the risk used to be 0.001% then a 33% increase isn't much to worry about.
The book has many examples from real world medicine of people having great disruption caused because they took medical treatment based on a faulty understanding of the numbers. It wasn't just lay people making the mistakes either; many doctors and consultants were getting the numbers wrong.
In general, focused ultrasound is the cure to a lot of ailments but is criminally underfunded at the moment. It's a potential immortality device.
(Sorry, that's just how you're coming across.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_focused_ultrasou...
http://bergcityuni.wordpress.com/projects/cardiac-ablation-u...
(links to sites linking to university funded medical researchers)
It doesn't take long to do a GOOGLE SEARCH. For a supposedly tech themed discussion site there's a lot of closed-minded and google-challenged folk on here.
And waste time wading through a bunch of patent nonsense put up by scammers in the often-vain hope that there is something, just one real item of legitimate information, lost in all the dross.
You say 'closed-minded', I say 'wary of wasting time on yet another example of the alt-med scammer runaround'.
Maybe it isn't now, but with enough automated testing on mice or pigs etc. it will get to a mature point. This can also be parallelized, so maybe it can be done in a few months.
Well, I'm saying that the alt-med scammers can come up with 500 new 'potential cures' in the time it takes the real medical world to test one.
And that testing requires so many resources, especially in terms of the time of skilled people who should be doing something more likely to be productive, that it will likely never be done.
This reasoning applies more to stuff that's obvious nonsense, like everything that has suppurated out of the festering wound that is homeopathy, but everything goes through a period where the default reaction is skepticism. That's called science. That's what works.
The sad fact is, a lot of potential therapies that are a lot more promising than this is will turn out to be dead ends. Unless there's a good reason to think this specific proposed therapy has at least as much chance of panning out as all the other proposed therapies the various labs have already come up with, there's no reason to spend a lot of resources on it.
I mean as a mechanism, "focused ultrasound" pretty much says it all. But how successful is it in trials? I think I took a quick look at some links (or googled) based on another one of your comments, but not being in the medical field, or currently needing any repairs that involve tissue ablation, I didn't spend too long investigating the state of the art.
FWIW, I didn't downvote you. I just want to encourage you to sound less crackpottish. Focus on peer-reviewed evidence for specific applications, don't allude to some miracle cure-all.
Furthermore, I think the medical industry is full of unsystematic people. Every time you see a medical lab, it's a guy walking around physically moving petri dishes. That's why I'm trying to promote in the tech circles, they do overly ambitious things.
Rather than simply naysaying, people should give a concrete reason refuting the claim that focused ultrasound is potentially a cure-all. I can't think of any, and I've put thought into it.
This effect is, I'm afraid, largely independent of whether you're -actually- right or not - so assuming your goals include "maximise the number of readers of your comment who go on to do some research about the technique", adjusting the language you use to try and put across that they should go and research it is probably a good idea.
Disclaimer: The above in no way indicates a judgement as to whether the technique in question is sufficiently awesome to deserve the language you used.
edit: I get you're trying to give advice. If I make the claims less exciting no-one will bother. If too exciting, they think unfeasible. Getting the balance right seems hard.
Then why hasn't anyone done precisely this?
You made the claim; you are familiar with the subject. If you had made the search and presented links that would have been one person spending a few minutes doing a search.
By expecting everyone who reads your post to do the web searching your asking for many people to spend a few minutes each doing a search.
The inefficiency is sub-optimal, no?