The abstract is still up, but not only is the link to the full text no longer working, the paper is not on the list for the issue of the Epilepsy & Behavior that the citation PubMed gives for it says it ought to be in. The full text would make it clear exactly what sort of consciousness is being altered here.

This seems to be a problem with Epilepsy & Behavior, in that a lot of what they're listed as having in the current issue of the journal on PubMed they don't list as in it on their own site. This does not strike me as a desirable thing in a scientific journal. (Yes, I did take the time to check through PubMed to see if this was a unique-to-this-paper issue or something else, and they've got a few articles that would be of...greater interest to me if I was more confident of their editorial practices.)

Odds are that multiple subjects will only happen if multiple people with neurological trauma in the same area can be found. This is sort of a story, but more in the 'we can justify looking for people with this specific trauma' sense.

Unless you're actually willing to volunteer, in which case I suppose somebody might be able to locate a neurosurgeon both competent enough to inflict precisely-targeted brain damage & sufficiently lacking in ethics to do so on somebody who volunteered.

Some crashes, at least, have been traced back to issues with people caused by flaws in systems revealed through extensive use--some of them probably ought to have been anticipated, others really could only have been anticipated in the sense that it's not sane to assume you will catch everything.

Think of it as the infinite monkeys theorem of design testing: the more monkeys and the more time those monkeys have to bang on the system, the more likely flaws will be found. The onus here lies on those designing the system: assume that catastrophic systems failures will happen. The goal should be to make them rare, and to ensure that it will not take an unusually well-experienced & trained pilot to manage to do a controlled crash in case of an emergency.

If nothing else, it's a lot less of a PR mess if you're doing your debugging of a mostly-intact plane that hit with no fatalities, and probably also easier to figure out what happened.

Actually, by purchasing my healthcare for me, my employer can and does tell me what healthcare services I & my family can utilize through which healthcare they opt to purchase for me.

The healthcare one employer purchased for my family wanted to send me for some necessary surgery several hours away to a low-tier hospital (one which is on the local list of ones to avoid if you're fond of breathing, as I recall) by a doctor using absurdly antique methods. I had to pay out-of-pocket to get it done at a top-tier hospital located about ten minutes away, by a surgeon who uses modern methods.

Oh, yes, and this was during the brief period where they were actually willing to cover it at all, instead of assuming that some corp suit knows a specialized field of medicine better than people who are licensed to actually practice it.

This was actually normal, and while on paper I was covered for more than just routine checkups, in practice that was the only thing they could be gotten to cover. The closest they ever came to covering anything else I needed at the time, they wanted to go with the cheapest, lousiest kludge possible--and, I should add, some of them would have only been legal if the necessary loopholes had been inserted into the laws.

Give me the money instead, and let me purchase my own healthcare.

From the sound of it, you either want the handful of self-taught who will actually are actively seeking to improve their skills, or somebody who stopped at a bachelors. You're unlikely to get the first group staying long in a CS program, though--have you any idea how mind-numbing it is to sit there with very little to do most of the time, waiting in hope of this week finally finding something new?

Odds are, the reason you needed to prove you lived there was because there were people who were neither paying the fee for renting a space nor living at the apartments who were taking up spaces--some places issue placards and/or specific spots that go with the place, sometimes entirely because the place has had problems with non-residents using the lot as a public parking lot to the point of crowding out residents.

That said, there still needs to be sufficient spaces for residents' use, and it should be made clear before any money changes hands that this goes on--with a chance to ask questions like "So, is the fee charged for any guest parking, or just when there's a game?"

You say that like socialism is the solution, when it's the problem--all it does is let the ruling classes say and perhaps even truly believe that in screwing the plebeians they are doing them a favor.

When you make it expensive to employ additional people, you're going to ensure giving people overtime is favored over adding another employee, even when it would be otherwise preferred to have an additional employee.

When you make it expensive to have somebody work full-time, you increase the number of part-time workers--and the number of people having to work two part-time jobs in order to pay bills.

There is a problem when you set up the economy so that a company can be punished for deciding to be kind to their workers and not make a single worker do the labor of many...

Corporate welfare isn't the problem as much as bureaucrat welfare & the granting of functional monopolies to large corporations by screwing the smaller guys for them.

It should also certainly be possible for somebody to make a request for a copy of this record with, at most, only a little more trouble than one can get a copy of their normal medical records.

Ironically enough, the vaccine that this misconception is most often associated with, the MMR vaccine, is actually one that prevents autism. (One of the known causes is in utero exposure to rubella, and the vaccine needs to be gotten before pregnancy.) Getting to critical mass also basically means that as few exceptions as possible ought to be made, especially as we learn more about the immune system and how long immunity actually lasts (or doesn't)--which is a reason to be wary of vaccines that promise most of their payoff decades down the line until it's been around for decades.

This is explicitly the system made illegal--and the definition of Affirmative Action that I get from Wikipedia is "Affirmative action or positive discrimination (known as employment equity in Canada, reservation in India, and positive action in the UK) is the policy of providing special opportunities for, and favoring members of, a disadvantaged group who suffer from discrimination."

Here's the relevant portion of the law we're talking about:

[The Constitution of Michigan of 1963, 26.2, quoted in full.]

California actually has a law very much like this, and the statistics so far seem to suggest that while it lowers the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos applying and admitted (which may simply be due to fewer applying), the percent of them graduating goes up when the law requires equality of opportunity.

I am, frankly, with people who think that the important number is the number who graduate--the higher education system should not be made the scapegoat for the failures of lower education system. That just allows the K12 system to get away with continuing to fail.

Some of the earliest race riots were Irish rioting over the fact that employers preferred to hire African-Americans. The stereotypes were that African-Americans were hard-workers and sometimes with touches of being childlike. Irish, meanwhile, were considered drunken, lazy, and dishonest...

Remember: historically white in the US meant "Protestant of Germanic/Scandinavian descent," especially once scientific racism hit.

All things considered, I think they did it by making it harder to commit suicide, and possibly also by improving labor conditions.

The usual process is to place somebody thought suicidal on a suicide watch. This can actually be very intrusive, and a test like this certainly is less than ideal if you're applying it at large--the accuracy here is for this population, and rather close to chance already. In a wider population, of a different makeup, its accuracy will be different, and probably lower.

More importantly, if you read the PLOS one article, they're discussing data mining the clinical notes themselves, and they admit that this is a branch of research that has been rather neglected: certain factors were deemed to have predictive value, without anybody really checking to see if that was true.

Let's say you're sitting in the entry way of an office building, and you notice that most people who come in to the building are men. This does not mean you can necessarily predict that a man walking past is going to enter the building; it might turn out that, in fact, of the people passing by the building, any given woman is more likely to come in--it's just that most of the people passing by right now are men.

It does not follow that if "Most of the people who do x are y" is true that "Most people who are y do x" is also true, for any set of x and y.

65% accuracy is not good, it's a start and it's better than what we currently have. In fact, the paper outright says that currently, they haven't even managed to validate the tool. In fact, I can easily give you the tl;dr version of this paper:

In less scientific phrasing:

It's not as much a breakthrough as a status report on the progress towards a breakthrough...

Shhh, we're not allowed to talk about that.

It gets even more hilarious when it gets brought up that, in fact, the largest known Mayan calendar apparently will not cycle until the universe is several times its current estimated age.

So those Mayan apocalypse predictions? Are based off the Mayan equivalent to a pocket calendar...

Merely because they decided against? This isn't the first time a sperm donor has been gone after for child support, and it doesn't even take much effort to know this...

"I don't know his name, I didn't ask and he didn't tell me. All I know is I still don't like d**k."

Actually, it's quite possible to get an anonymous donor for IVF, through sperm banks that pay donors. The problem is when you actually do want the possibility of contacting the donor or would prefer a friend or male relative as a donor--if nothing else, I'd feel it polite to let somebody who did me the courtesy of providing me sperm if it turns out that they're a carrier for a genetic defect. (Getting the testing done can sometimes require the catch 22 of knowing you have a blood relative who has it; this is actually a reason why adoptees argue they do have a right to know their biological parents.)

Ideally, it ought to be possible to have the records of a sperm or ovum donor sealed until either the resultant child turns 18 or medical necessity occurs--and those who 'sign' for the procedure being legally held as the child's guardian(s).

You can let them sort out exactly what they want the relationship to be: will it make any actual difference if they view themselves as siblings in all but blood or as a couple, as long as they're taking responsibility?