evolve2017

Not quite true - we're down to around 14 days with the latest generation of tests.

The ideal would be a rapid 'fever' panel that tests for all the viruses we currently pay a ton of money for. This sort of test could pick up early-stage HIV which, if symptomatic, don't feel much different from a cold/flu.

[1] - https://www.aafp.org/afp/2014/0215/afp20140215p265-f1.gif

I'm not an expert, but this seems like an area of debate. See a reply to that article:

http://www.pnas.org/content/113/45/E6908

To the moderators, the title would be more accurate with 'fMRI' as opposed to 'MRI'. The latter is typically used to examine structural brain elements, whereas fMRI is thought to correlate with brain activity and, by extension, thought.

Confusing the two would lead to the more unusual conclusion that suicidal ideation is associated with abnormal brain connectivity, while the authors are instead focusing on neuronal activity.

Thanks, this definitely bas been a well-played gambit on their part - I had no idea how extensive their lobbying had grown.

I think this is a pretty bold claim and would appreciate the sources you found probative.

If the statements you offer constitute sufficient evidence for you, I would say that numerous companies and industries have more contact with our lawmakers than what you have described.

That's a very interesting claim. What's your evidence?

Your parents' story is very impressive, but I think it highlights some aspects of privilege I have also encountered:

- The people who are able to emigrate from a poor/devastated country are generally the educated and former middle class

- Airfare is expensive, and in real terms was more expensive in the past; two tickets across the Atlantic probably represent more than most humans will ever make in their lives

- Some people are being rounded up/denied the right to enter the country on their visas. Even having the chance to roll the dice on life in the US is a huge advantage

I could go on.

I think it's uncomfortable to think of ourselves as anything but eminently worthy/self-reliant but this doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. I say this as the child of immigrants who now are worth millions but used to work security, after arriving with $100 in their pockets.

I think it’s unfair to discounts papers in a foreign field to one’s own as ‘minimum publishable unit’ - often the novelty and importance of a finding requires some background, which the new, longer narrative abstracts in Science are trying to provide.

As an opposing viewpoint, turning off wifi is exactly what I used to do when boarding a plane - my bluetooth radio is always off.

This is patently false (I have just done the very thing you said, then confirmed that the wifi was in fact still on).

I think this whole argument just lends more support to the idea that Apple is being deceptive with this UI.

I wonder if this means that the super resolution microscopy techniques are also in line for a Nobel...

This is very controversial - in short, there is no national recommendation for mammogram screening to start at 40 years.

Multiple professional organizations disagree (see below). For the societies that recommend age 45, they suggest that concerned women speak with their doctor regarding earlier screening.

Importantly, note that screening looks for signs of a disease in asymptomatic, normal-risk individuals. The presence of a family history or a lump/mass moves one from the category of screening into that of diagnosis.

Age 40: https://www.acr.org/About-Us/Media-Center/Press-Releases/201... - College of Radiology

https://www.acog.org/About-ACOG/News-Room/News-Releases/2017... - America College of Gynecology

Age 45: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2463262 - American Cancer Society

Age 50: https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/Page/Document/... - United States Preventive Services Task Force

Many surgical items are reused - for example scissors, and retractors. Surgeons may have their own set of tools that they continue to use.

Lower cost items are not reused (a scalpel, which might simply be a piece of plastic attached to a blade).

Very interesting! I'm not sure I agree with your reasoning for the mitochondrial mutation point:

    > * Mitochondrial DNA is passed by mothers only and so undergoes very little mutation

It's true that mothers pass on mitochondrial DNA but this doesn't necessarily require the absence of mitochondrial DNA mutations. I would imagine the lower rates of DNA mutation are due to the importance of the mitochondrial genome for generating a cell's energy.

On mobile, so I may not get to reply fully!

We actually do have some idea about necks and I believe noses - the important elements are DNA enhancers. There was a presentation at the Society for Developmental Biology in 2012 on this topic, though I can't recall the scientist who discussed this...

I remember seeing this result. It's tantalizing but - and in the absence of mandated reporting perhaps the best we may have. I will take a look at the paper but I wonder what biases exist in officer-initiated reporting.

Lastly, we're setting a low bar if our standard for police mistreatment is killing as opposed to inappropriate behavior, writ large.

I do see your point, but I'm not sure this data undercuts the importance of a movement like BLM.

EDIT: For the second link, I'm not sure how much I believe a psychology experiment in this setting - I don't know this literature but my a priori bias is that the individuals who would do this type of study in Seattle are not representative of the median US police officer

I find this very curious - why do you think this movement came to attention if the killings are rare?

Also, your comment implies that there's an acceptable number of police killings of unarmed/fleeing suspects - what would you say that number is in your country?

I made this comment a few days ago, but I think a lot of readers are getting tripped up in his (likely very artfully deployed) wording and avoiding his underlying messages.

The passage in which that quote occurs clearly implies that the bar has already been lowered - in fact, the second half of the sentence offers the mechanism through which the 'bar had been lowered' ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate")

> No one would find it weird if I claimed that women aren't able to run a 100 as fast as men. Yes, there might be some exceptional cases where women can compete, but they are just that, exceptions to the rule. Most of the time women compete among themselves since they would never qualify for anything if they competed in the same category as men. Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?

I guess I'm surprised that this is controversial (in response to your most recent comment to a sibling poster) - the reason we don't accept that women are worse programmers than men is... we don't have evidence that women are worse programmers than men.

There are data about physical strength (and amazingly clear biological correlates - most HN posters will never outmatch a top female athlete, and we only need to do a quick lab test to determine this). However, female/minority intelligence has been, and continues to be, a politicized issue - until the more overt instances of discrimination are eliminated, how can we jump from blaming the obvious societal barriers to blaming biology?

I think this is the fallacy of hiring that every startup makes, the idea that only Linus is good enough to write your CRUD app.

Incidentally, we do not know whether his statement is true, or whether the changes to Google's hiring practices have changed the employees' operational capability.

In the absence of this information, with such a clearly (if somewhat subtly) stated opinion, it's natural that one would be offended by his words.

Before accepting a statement like his, it would behoove us to know what the actual policy changes are.

I'm not sure how you're privvy to his thought process.

Also, the idea that finding ways to employ more women+minorities leads to poorer employees is exactly what many people don't after about - essentially, your argument is taking his opinion as fact, while I only wanted to point out the underlying message to his words.

I think this has been talked about multiple times over - Damore did not have a line that states that women and/or minorities are bad engineers.

He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities.

I think it's awfully charitable not to infer that he considers the women/minorities at Google (on average) to be inferior engineers.

Still, it's true that he never said that...

I see what you're implying with your UC/Crohn's reference, but it actually underscores why CFS is so hard of a diagnosis.

In UC/Crohn's, patients presented with recurrent bouts of bloody diarrhea in the absence of infectious symptoms, with possible associations of malabsorption, fistulas, and colon cancer. These are pretty straightforward things to diagnose and clearly represent pathology, irrespective of whether we can assign a name to them.

CFS includes symptoms that don't fall so far from the range of 'normal' human experiences, thus it's much harder to define syndromically.

IBS is an interesting choice for comparison, as it, like CFS, seems to be in part a psychiatric diagnosis at least as it relates to stress. Nothwithstanding, there are clear associations for IBS - chronic abnormal bowel movements and abdominal pain, neither of which is 'normal'.

I happen to share your skepticism about a mitochondrial origin for this syndrome, though I am not familiar with the research (would appreciate a review on the topic - I saw one linked earlier in the comments from BMC Genetics that seemed to conclude that mitochondria are not involved).

> You are very assertive, but this proves that you don't know what you are talking about. Antibiotics are all "bacteriocidal".

I also found this confusing when I first learned about it, but some antibiotics work by directly killing organisms (i.e., are bacteriocidal) whereas others simply block the ability of bacteria to grow (i.e., are bacteriostatic). [1]

There are a few clinical cases where one would avoid bacteriocidal antibiotics, as the internal contents of a bacterium could further worsen a patient's symptoms.

1. By no means an authoritative reference, just a cool demonstration of this concept: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24284484

I think that's an issue that a lot of science-minded folks disagree with.

I happen to think there's a lot about the author's time/mental state/life circumstances that one can find in the words themselves.

A much more light-hearted example is Quentin Tarrantino's insistence that he hasn't watched the Truffaut film 'And the bride wore black' - even though Kill Bill is an eerily similar remake.

Should I believe the author's product or his rationalization?

I'm finding this to be a fascinating look at how people, as a group, do literary criticism.

I think, if we step back from the actual words on the paper and examine the author's intent, his choice of evidence, and the mere fact that he chose to write this, we can learn just as much as from trying to decide whether or not he was talking about a population effect when talked about women before mentioning Google employees.

This is totally different from wondering about the biology. As a biologist, I think it's preposterous to start to infer biological bases to the types of psychology experiments cited. I do, however, think this could be open to debate. I feel that the undertone to the author's message is likely less unclear.

These also happen to be the most difficult to use in terms of dosing frequency and rate of blood glucose control.

In the US of all places, there isn't a good argument for the very, very slightly modified newer insulins to cost so much more.

(these points are alluded to in the article, just want to mention them here, as well)

I don't quite understand the snark in your response - were you, unlike the purported cheering liberals, fond of the purveyors of fake news?

I agree with you in part - I find the biological explanations very unsatisfying given the many peculiar things we are socialized to do (proms, engagement proposals, baby showers, amongst many others, likely do not find their origins in our genes).

An analogy I thought of while reading this was that of a broken random number generator function. We're more likely to assess the software/environment in which the code is running than to blame the underlying computer.

This doesn't change my overall conclusions, but I think the role of work colleagues in personal friendships is field-dependent, and even then, workplace dependent. In my industry, some work groups spend inordinate amounts of time together, whereas I would rather go home at the end of a work day. These differences don't map cleanly to gender composition.

I think I'm outside the edit window for my comment. As a coda, it looks like mortality due to measles may have been declining before the incidence of measles began to decline; this further supports a role for other societal developments in decreasing death from infectious disease.

This is purportedly related to the use of antibiotics to decrease bacterial sequelae of measles. I saw an academic reference to this effect but I can't find it again - here's a popular article. You'll note that this commentator ascribes some of the decrease in measles-related death to sanitation.

1. http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2009/09/02/measles-deaths-...

I did not mean to be belligerent in my response and I'm sorry if I offended you.

As I said above, in the Western world, sanitation and other interventions both contributed to our current state of health. As the graph I linked to shows, antibiotics haven't appreciably changed the rate of decline of infectious disease. This is no way means that antibiotics and/or vaccines are ineffective. As you point out, looking at specific diseases shows that these interventions are helpful.

Here's the data for measles if folks are interested - there was indeed a remarkable drop after the institution of the vaccine[1].

1. https://www.quackwatch.com/03HealthPromotion/immu/immu01.htm...