Murderers rationalize their crimes in exactly the same way.

Yaz

For those who aren't aware of what was said, in the case of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's comments, I don't think Godwin is being appropriately applied.

Mr. Trudeau didn't compare the government to that of the Nazis. He didn't compare it to Hitler. He didn't claim that a government policy was as bad as the Holocaust.

What he did say is that current anti-Muslim government policies are akin to the Canadian policy just after World War II of "none is too many" when it came to Jewish immigrants to Canada, which the Government of Canada has since admitted was wrong.

In essence, it compared a current policy to a previous policy that the Government had admitted was wrong. I don't see why everyone is so upset, other than that the government would like to try to make this into a Godwin-like comparison in order to score cheap political points. For the record, according to the interview (for anyone who doesn't RTFA), Mr. Godwin agrees with this analysis.

Minister Blaney, however, seems in my mind to have skirted the line much more closely, specifically bringing up the Holocaust as an example to try to prop up support for an unpopular bill. His specific statement, that the Holocaust didn't begin with the gas chambers, but with words is correct -- however I have to agree with MP Randall Garrison (FWIW, he represents my riding, although admittedly I didn't vote for him in the last election) who said that this was "over-inflated rhetoric".

So in essence we have one instance worthy of invoking Godwin against, and another that had nothing directly to do with the Holocaust, but instead a Canadian policy that happened around the same time, and affected the same people, which mirrors in some respects what the current Government is attempting to do with a different population, for which Godwin shouldn't apply (but which is being brought out in some corners in an attempt to score political hay).

Yaz

Well, then you'd simply be wrong.

You see, there isn't one "Placebo Effect". The effect is different for different ailments.

An example: you have a patient who is suffering from a migraine. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they say they feel somewhat better. That may be the "placebo effect".

A second patient comes in who has had a heart attack. They aren't breathing, and there is no pulse. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they're dead.

When constructing studies with placebos, you typically have to compare like with like. There isn't a universal Placebo Constant you just throw into your paper to compare against-- you have to compare outcomes between a population of patients with condition X taking the substance being tested, to the outcomes of a population of patients, also with condition X, who are taking placebos. The placebos may or may not have any effect -- that makes no difference. What is important is that the substance you're testing will ideally do better than placebos do, otherwise you might as well just use the cheaper placebos for the condition at hand, and head back to the drawing board.

(This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of how such studies are run and constructed -- it is provided for illustrative purposes only)

Yaz

And that's why they compare things like this to placebos, and not poisons.

The purpose of such testing to see if the medicine in question is actually having an active, biological effect against disease. Placebos don't have any sort of active biological effect on people; they have a more passive, mental effect. If your effect is statistically indistinguishable from a placebo, than all you really have is a different type of placebo. If you do statistically better than a placebo, then we infer that there is an active biological effect of the substance in question. If you somehow do statistically worse than a placebo, then you have some serious issues with the compound you're studying.

In effect, what this research has found is that homeopathic preparations have no active biological effect, and that they are, in fact, just overly-processed, overly-expensive placebos. For things that can be healed psychosomatically (or which will heal in the normal course of time, and just makes the patient feel less anxiety over something being done about their condition), they're just a very expensive version of a sugar pill. They still, however, have no effect on AIDS or brain tumours or TB.

Placebos are often used as the control because we expect medicine to be better than a placebo. And as this study has shown, homeopathy isn't better than a plain-jane placebo.

Now if homeopathic practitioners were honest about this, it probably wouldn't be an issue. But they claim they can cure everything from ingrown toenails to cancer -- and that's a serious issue.

Yaz

Actually, that may depend. I haven't looked at the WatchKit APIs yet to see what internal time representation they're using, but it may be susceptible to the Year 2038 Problem

Of course, what everyone seems to be ignoring is that the case is (as are some of the pins in the straps) 18k gold. According to Apple, the large Apple Edition watch has a case that weighs 69g. Now that's probably not all gold (the back is ceramic, the front is glass, the internals are electronic), however at the very least there is roughly $1000 USD of gold in there.

So while it's possible it won't retain its original price, it will probably never become worthless -- at the very least, there is some 30g or so of 18k gold there.

Yaz

Sure they are -- they're just really early on the euphemism treadmill

Can you recall a time when someone didn't use one of these terms as a put-down? I sure can't.

Yaz

Well, it's not my media -- I'm Canadian, and have never lived in the US. I visit from time to time, and have had some business related trips here and there, but it's not my country.

Still, if you want a more impartial view of things that are happening in the US, you can do worse than talking to a Canadian. Canadians are the great American watchers. It's somewhat hard to avoid -- we share a continent, they have 10 times our population, and we get most of their television channels. Their politics and business often affects us quite intimately, so we have a collective habit of paying a lot of attention to what they're doing down there. To paraphrase one of our greatest Prime Ministers, we're a mouse in bed with an elephant. It's certainly good policy to keep an eye on the elephant, in case it decides to roll over.

I've never been to Sweden, so I can't really say much about your experiences there.

What I can say is that anytime an American has decided they need more freedom, they come to Canada. There are a lot of examples over the last few hundred years: the United Empire Loyalists (basically, people loyal to England during the American Revolution), black slaves via the Underground Railroad, Vietnam draft dodgers, Iraq veterans who did't want to be redeployed yet again -- the list is long and varied.

This debate has also occurred within the US, in conjunction with illegal immigrants from Mexico, particularly in places like Arizona, which tried to pass laws permitting law enforcement to target people like this. IIRC, the measure failed in the end due to the fact they were targeting people who "looked Mexican", even if they were long-time American citizens. So that's hardly unique to Sweden.

There is a big difference between the propaganda and how Hollywood would like everyone to see the US, and reality here too, unfortunately.

It's hard to be free when you can't afford health care, and a member of your family gets ill. It's hard to be free when the state you live in has a history of serious racial segregation. It's hard to be free when you're homosexual and your employer is 100% legally entitled to fire you from your job, or your landlord to evict you because of your sexual orientation. And the US has the largest incarcerated population of any country in the world (more than 2.2 million Americans are in jail, giving it the second highest per capita incarceration rate in the world). There are a lot of people in the US for whom "land of the free" has never lived up to the hype.

You'd probably find that Sweden would be a whole lot richer if it had 330 million people living there.

A very large part of the US's wealth really comes down to the number of people. That's not to put down the fact that they have developed a very advanced nation, of course -- it still takes a lot of work to get to the Western worlds level of development, and to maintain a high level of productivity. However, Sweden is also an advanced nation, and if it had the population of the US, you'd probably find that Sweden would be a whole lot richer as well.

I don't mean to put down the US. But there is a difference between the nationalistic/super-patriotic way they see themselves, and reality. I invite you to travel there and see the reality for yourself. There are amazing people and places there, but there is also a lot of unnecessary social ills. How you are treated there will depends a lot on where you are, what colour your skin is, what religion you follow, immigration status, and what your sexual orientation is. Different people will have wildly different experiences, because there is still a huge amount of prejudice there. People in those groups hardly feel all that "free". As the great American President JFK once said, "...this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free."

Yaz

You seriously need to take off those rose-tinted glasses.

Or maybe just read a US news website once in a while. The US is a country where a) justice is applied very unequally, depending on your race (ref: the recent analysis of Ferguson, Missouri); b) where there are all sorts of political battles raging right now over the number of illegal immigrants living in the US (estimated in 2008 as 12 million people; more than the entire population of Sweden! The basis is often about how the President isn't doing enough to "protect the border"), and has the highest murder rate of any of the western, industrialized nations (by quite a bit -- you're nearly 7 times more likely to be murdered in the US than in Sweden, for example).

There are a lot of things to laud the United States over -- but the ones you specifically picked aren't them. Unless you were going for sarcasm, in which case "whoosh!" to me.

Yaz

I'm not convinced you know your history of devices at the time all that well.

WinCE/Windows Mobile/etc. didn't start to succeed against Palm because of great improvements in Windows for devices; it started to take over because of overt stagnation in PalmOS-based devices.

Palm become successful with the PalmPilot and PalmPilot Pro, in part because it was simple, quick, and worked. It avoided many of the complexities of the PC ecosystem, such as the notion of everything being in a "file" (PalmOS used an in-memory record-based storage model instead), so that people could work with the kinds of PDA data they wanted to work with in a more natural manner.

Unfortunately, Palm saw great success, and pretty much decided to keep on doing what they were doing, without really pushing any significant boundaries. They dragged their feet on implementing a colour display. They dragged their feet adding any form of wireless communication (before the Tungsten era, they only communications you could get were either via the serial interface, or via a modem over the serial interface). Palm OS 6.0 (Cobalt) was in development for a good part of a decade, and in the end never shipped on any device. The business itself went from being a stand-alone business to being bought out by US Robotics, which was then bought out by 3Com two years later. The founders didn't like the direction 3Com was taking the company, bailed, and formed Handspring. Meanwhile, only two years later, 3Com spun Palm off into it's own, separate company again. Two years after that, Palm broke itself into palmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software)...in another two years, palmOne bought out some of PalmSources IP, and the rest of PalmSource was sold to ACCESS. palmOne became Palm again, merged with Handspring, developed webOS -- and a few short years later was bought out by HP.

Now I didn't have a very large peek behind the scenes -- I was out on the sidelines writing the jSyncManager, once in a while hearing from a manager at Palm, but even from the outside it was easy to see that the serious game of Hot Potato being played with/by Palm led to some serious issues with innovation. There really wasn't any. Developments were iterative and slow. Where they were once ahead of the curve, by the year 2000 they were already falling behind. It took them ages just to integrate their system with a phone! The device and platform was nearly stagnant by the time webOS was released, and while innovative, in the end it was too little, too late -- especially when compared to what Apple showed the world with iOS.

The point being, Windows on mobile devices didn't rise in prominence because they suddenly were seen as extremely good devices. They had a UI with lots of small items that needed a stylus to manipulate, their browser was substandard, and the devices needed frequent rebooting. Battery life wasn't great, and when compared to Palm with it's simplified interface, were a PITA to use for normal PDA uses. Sure, they were great for the Windows geek who wanted to show how they had an underpowered Windows PC in their pocket, and became somewhat the standard for use in embedded systems like barcode scanners, but for virtually everyone else, they were nearly useless. However, they did suck much less than Palm did by that time. PalmOS pretty much hadn't changed in 10 years. It took ages for them to add simple things like colour and wireless networking (and even when they did, that was a feature relegated to only one or two models). The core of the OS was pretty close to stagnant -- they used pretty much the same non-threaded kernel from the original Pilot 1000 all the way up to PalmOS 4. Windows for mobile devices only looked good in comparison to how badly Palm continually fumbled around instead of innovating.

Looking back, considering that Windows on mobile devices (in its various incarnations) was only better in that it sucked less than Palm did, it shouldn't come as any surprise that Apple came in and ate everyones lunches overnight. Microsoft than, as now, took the wrong approach, and Palm just sat around and frittered away their lead until they didn't matter anymore (not entirely their fault -- all the resets and restarts and changes in direction from being bought and sold every 2 - 3 years for 15 years was as much to blame as anything). Microsoft only had the distinction of being the best of the worst -- which is still better than Palm's giving away the market entirely.

In summation, Windows Mobile 5 didn't knock "Palm down several notches". Palm was already actively falling down a notch-filled pit of doom. Sure, this helped Windows Mobile for a short while, but I'm not so sure that "sucking less than Palm" is really all that much to brag about. In the end, the market certainly didn't find it all that exciting.

Yaz

Because it violates the standard definition of "refactoring".

Refactoring is about changing the structure of the code, and not the algorithms used within the code. The goal is typically to reduce coupling, increase cohesion, and (frequently) to improve testability.

Replacing an algorithm with a better algorithm isn't "refactoring", it's "rewriting".

Taking your giant brute-force method and breaking it into smaller parts in a cohesive unit (source file, class, package, etc.) with lowered coupling (perhaps by genericizing previously tightly-coupled bits), in such a way that the individual units have a smaller testing surface -- but is otherwise the same algorithm -- then you've refactored the code, by definition.

Yaz

Objective-C++!

(Yes, there is such a thing. And yes, I'm being facetious.)

Yaz

It isn't that hard -- Macs haven't had any sort of specialty printer port on any model that I'm aware of for at least 15 years now.

Yaz

Unfortunately, the experiment came to an abrupt end when they threw "ET: The Extra Terrestrial" at the AI, whereupon after an hour of trying different tactics the AI decided that the only way to win was to send a power surge through the system, frying the only working Atari 2600 the researchers could dig up.

This still classifies the AI as coming up with the best solution to the game ever implemented.

Yaz

I agree -- however, I find most people with some background in at least one science can at least glean something from reading the abstract, and hopefully some bits and pieces of the statistical analysis (something I admittedly wish I had better background in. If I could afford the time and money to go back to University, I'd love to take stats and philosophy of science).

I think part of the problem for many peoples that the state of knowledge in science isn't a binary proposition. In much of science, the answer to 'Is X true?" boils down to five possibilities: 'yes', 'yes with caveats', 'no', 'no with caveats', and 'uncertain' ("more research in this area is required"). So if you're seeing only a few studies, and they seem to be contradictory, the conclusion you need to take is simply "this area requires more research".

And that is my problem with how most people approach science. They see one study, and say 'Science says X!", when in reality, it's really just one study that says X. Unless you have a massive body of scientific work behind a concept (such as evolution, or gravitation), one can't really make any claims as to what "science" says. Consequently, you also shouldn't be disappointed if future research on a new or lightly researched area of science later produces a paper with a contradictory view -- you can't feel that this means that "Science was wrong!". Science is seldom, if ever, "wrong" -- but how much importance people put into preliminary/early/initial results can certainly make them mistakenly feel that way.

I'm somewhat reminded of how people with multiple sclerosis reacted to Dr. Paolo Zamboni's "liberation therapy". Here was a medical doctor who produced a paper where he looked at the neck veins of a group of people with MS, found they had some narrowing of the veins and iron deposits in the brain, and came up with an angioplasty procedure to open these veins up, believing that MS was caused by "chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency" (basically, insufficient blood drainage from the brain). He tried it on his own wife, she subjectively said she felt a bit better, and suddenly MS sufferers around the world were flying to third-world countries to have this done to them (for a fee, of course), and in some countries (like Canada) were begging their national governments to bring the procedure on-shore and to make it part of the social healthcare system.

Unfortunately, Dr. Zamboni's research was deeply flawed. Firstly, his study wasn't "blinded". It also didn't have a comparison group -- he didn't even look for vein narrowing in non-MS populations. Thirdly, he didn't disclose that he had financial ties to a company that made equipment to treat the condition he had "discovered". These are all problematic, but IMO the worst was really the lack of a comparison group for control purposes. As two further studies have shown, the type of vein narrowing Dr. Zamboni detected are equally prevalent in both people with MS and people without MS.

Now MS is a terrible disease. People who suffer from MS live in a sort of quiet bravery, in constant struggle against their condition, and with a lot of hope for a cure. I hope one is found. Unfortunately, all too many of them jumped on this one, and got ill-advised procedures done, which in some cases has led to a worsening of their symptoms, and even death. Damage has been done, all because one paper made a lot of hopeful people jump up and say "Science says X!", when really all that "science" should be saying (and what most scientists in this area actually said) was "this is a potentially interesting result -- let's do more research in this area to see if it goes anywhere".

Truth be told, the vast bulk of science output tends to come down to "more research in this area is needed". That's what the "common man on the street" misses when they see a "result" in a single paper. Sure research needs to be taken only as a stating point for more research -- and not an end-point recommending what people need to do. As a process, science requires a lot of time to really get to the point where it can say 'X is true (with caveats)'.

(As an aside, one general scientific area that I'm interested in is negative results: science that doesn't work. The kind of science where the preliminary result says "we hypothesized this might be true, but we now know it isn't". Not enough of this sort of science seems to happen (or get good funding/publicity) anymore, unless you're disproving someone else original, positive result. The negative result is extremely scientifically honest, and sets up some useful boundaries for what we think might be true. Unfortunately, even scientists want to be the people who discover the next big thing, and many funding organizations want to fund science that leads directly to some result they can sell, making it harder to do science that discovers where the edges of knowledge are.)

Yaz

(For the record, educated as a scientist, but not currently working in primary research)

Do you not have children?

Yup -- we have a 4yo. The recommendation we received was to give her some small smears of peanut butter around the age of 1 now and then, and to simply watch for any negative reactions.

She had none, which of course doesn't prove anything in and of itself.

I should note that the results from the recent study aren't new. Here are a few papers worth checking out on the subject:

• Early consumption of peanuts in infancy is associated with a low prevalence of peanut allergy (2008 - an interesting study, although I will note it was apparently funded by the US National Peanut Board),
• Factors Associated with the Development of Peanut Allergy in Childhood(2003 - an interesting part of this article link is that it contains a tab to read all of the letters the journal received concerning this research. It's a useful read for you, as it shows how research is commented on, and potentially refined within the scientific community).

Interestingly, the above link does mention that the advice you received was common advice (at the time of publication in 2008) in the UK, Australia, and in the past in North America (so I don't disbelieve that you received this advice -- although "common" doesn't necessarily imply "supported by research").

Yaz