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?

I'd like to note that the complaint about racism is, as is traditional, ignoring the fact that Asian and Middle Eastern groups are represented--with the traditional not-so-subtle implication that they're not 'real' minorities--and ignoring the fact that the problem could easily be a lack of people from the underrepresented groups who want to turn up. The social stigma placed on being interested in technical subjects is not limited to white males.

But the more important this is that these kinds of programs can--when done like a sexist/racist farce, which is also traditional--make it worse because it reinforces the stereotypes, and add a generous helping of resentment. Better would be a program that simply views everybody involved as people interested in whatever the technical subject is--and expects everybody to be up to the work & treat everybody else as a person.

And if they do want to actually have projects encouraging, say, Native Americans to code--why not sponsor coding projects whose results will be useful to those communities, to help show those communities why they should value those skills? This would be most efficiently done by actually having the ideas for these projects come out of the community, and favoring sponsorship of those projects where at least some of the coders will need to be members of the community in order to understand what the program needs to do...

Estimating wrong how many calories you're consuming & how many you're burning is why the first phase includes keeping track of it--it helps you make good estimates and gives both you and the doctor useful information. A lot of the things for which obesity may be a symptom of can be treated, if not cured, and the best outcomes tend to come from early detection.

Simply throwing drugs blindly at the problem is not optimal treatment, and it's only going to be worse if it's not even being thrown at the actual problem.

That's what you need to try first, at least. A couple weeks or a month of "eat less move more," keeping track of what you ate & how much you moved, then check to see if it helped. If it did, yay, you're overweight because of your lifestyle! Maybe diet drugs can help, maybe they won't, but either way you definitely will need to adjust your lifestyle.

It didn't work? Okay, time to check other things, because it's clearly not you taking in more calories than you use, so it's actually not a disease but a symptom. Lifestyle might certainly be more painful to try to change, but lower-calorie diets are much easier to live with than ones resulting from, say, food intolerances. (I have to read the labels on all the food I buy, because of this sort of issue; living in a household where certain people can't eat certain things is educational.)

Diet drugs shouldn't be handed out automatically, and I'd prefer that the primary care physician just not hand out the diet drug prescriptions instead of assuming always that obesity is the disease instead of possibly a symptom...especially since insurance companies tend to believe they're excellent diagnosticians, just like an undertrained field technicians believes they know everything there is to know about the system they're sent out to repair.

(The best thing here? If you're lucky enough that your problem is entirely eating more calories than you burn, then you literally don't need to change anything about your diet other than the total number of calories. Eating healthier will lower the risk of malnutrition, but it isn't necessary...)

And users are not part of the ecosystem?

Microsoft's job is to produce an operating system that does not sell the competition--Android tablets, iPads, and Macs. Metro by itself running Metro applications was what sold me on not buying a Win8 machine: my several-year-old Android tablet already did it all, did it better, and did more. I saw no indication of how to get to the desktop--this, in and of itself, is Bad Design. Several of the reviews I've read commented on this particular problem.

The hardware OEMs and developers are simply not going to migrate over if nobody's going to buy it. Look at what's happened to the Microsoft tablets: nobody's buying, nobody's willing to make them 'cept for Microsoft...and it looks like even Microsoft's realizing they're not selling.

I'm not saying that the transition wasn't necessary, I'm saying that the design is bad, nearly unusably so, and it's not old fogies. I'm part of the 'younger generation' you talked about and it was making me miss command line interfaces. (I'm a geek. Of course I can use them; it's very do not want, but I can.)

You're assuming that's the only cost to consider here.

There's quite a few people whose primary sales are at shows, fairs, and the ilk who, if they did go with a dumbphone as you suggest, would lose sales because they would not be able to accept plastic--and many of whom certainly would not be accepting checks, because they can't afford the risk of bad checks. I've been seeing some that have permanent locations going the same route, suggesting that the system is proving to be overall a better choice than the traditional ones.

I also know people who use their smartphone to minimize time they have to spend in the office doing paperwork--or even eliminate the need for an actual office--which makes a difference when what actually brings in the money is field work. (This can be really important when they're in business for themselves or work as a subcontractor.)

The other thing is that, due to certain court decisions, cell companies actually can't charge you extra to use your smartphone as a tethered modem/portable hotspot, at least in the US...which is actually one of the major reasons to have one if it costs you more money to be tethered to a physical office and/or dependent on being able to locate WiFi hotspots while mobile. For me, it's generally been the case that a short response sent quickly has always been better than long sent later--even if the short, quickly-sent response is primarily intended to acknowledge I got the email and the long response will be sent later...

And Windows 8 manages to combine only the worst of both tablets and Windows, like a teacup-sized pony being sold to do the job of both a draft horse and a poodle. It can't actually do the work of the draft horse, and what with being a horse does an unsurprisingly bad job of being a dog.

It may skip a few of the bad things each does, but that isn't enough to keep me from not wanting to have had to pay for an expensive OS that I will be replacing practically immediately.