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Submission + - Trump's feud with Harvard endangers 50 years of women's health samples (cnn.com) 2

quonset writes: For fifty years, Harvard has been collecting medical information and samples from female nurses. The data have led to deeper insights and contributed a better understanding into human health. However, President Trump's feud with Harvard may see all the information and samples being discarded.

Study data gathered through the years from some 280,000 nurses in the United States has contributed enormously to improving how we live. The work has informed dietary recommendations, including national dietary guidelines; led to hormonal therapies for breast cancer prevention and treatment; and contributed to research about how nutrients, inflammatory markers and heavy metals influence disease development.

Funding for the Nurses’ Health Study and its companion study for men, the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, had already been abruptly withdrawn in mid-May, said Harvard nutritionist Dr. Walter Willett, who has led the studies since 1980.

Willett and his team were left scrambling to find the funds needed to protect freezers stocked with stool, urine and DNA specimens gathered from thousand of nurses for nearly five decades. Just the liquid nitrogen needed to keep the specimens frozen costs thousands of dollars a month.

“Of course, we would all love to have an agreement that lets us get on with research, education, and working to improve the health and well-being of everyone.” said Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, who has published over 2,000 papers on nutrition.

“But this can’t happen if we turn over admissions, faculty hiring and curriculum to governmental control.”

Comment Stifling innovation and hurting business is OK (Score 1) 36

I do not want criminals to innovate. There are lots of businesses and users that should be hurt. Drug cartels come to mind.

In some businesses innovation makes the world a better place. In others, it makes it worse.

Governments make laws. Those that break the laws are criminals. It does not matter if they pay millions in legal taxes, such as Google or Ticketmaster, or do not pay the taxes and have to launder the money - such as organized crime and drug cartels.

Government is concerned with things more important than money. Sometimes it is fairness, sometimes it is power. But talking about innovation and money is not convincing to any competent law maker. It just makes you sound like a greedy bastard that will do anything for money.

Comment Re:Good deal (Score 4, Insightful) 83

#1, The prisoners do not pay the money, their loved ones do.

#2, When someone says it is OK to do X because of unrelated Y, they are almost always wrong. If X is OK, it stands by itself.

#3, they are not getting free housing, free clothing, or free food. Claiming they do is no different than claiming slaves got free stuff.

I am always surprised at how much evil crap people are now stating freely because they think it is 'acceptable' and that everyone else is also evil. Nope. We are better than that, better than you. By better I mean morally, ethically, and mentally. We can out think you all the while getting into Heaven.

Good luck with your evil, god sees into your heart.

Comment They are great at detecting Zebras (Score 1) 70

My father had a saying about when you hear hoof beats, its not Zebras. You look for horses first.

There is not one type of accuracy,but two. Chance of false positives and chance of false negatives. Most of the time you care more about false positives (hey, this test says you have deadly disease when you don't), rather than false negatives (sorry we failed to catch the fact that you have the disease).

Example: Deadly disease is rare - only happens 4% of the time. Out of 1000 people, 40 people actually have the disease, and 960t. For an 80% correct positive diagnosis, that means it will show 40*0.8= 32 have it. Fails to catch 8 people (false negatives). This test is 80% "Sensitive" issue, detecting the problem when it exists.

But what is the percent of false negatives? The test could be 80% accurate here too, showing 800*0.8 = 640 as true negatives, leaving 160 false positives? This is called "Specifity". But what if it is for example only 50% specific. That would be showing 800*.5=400 people correctly true negative, with 400 people falsely told they have the disease?

Honestly, usually we care far more about "Specificity" issue. Even assuming the 80% rate, it is pretty horrible to correctly catch 32 (out of 40) true sick people, if it also informs 160 (out of 800) healthy they have the disease.

It is easy to create a test with a higher Sensitivity if you do not care about Specificity, but that is rarely a good idea, especially for an initial exam.

Usually you want something with a high specificity to make sure you are not terrifying patients and beginning dangerous, expensive, and/or painful treatments on healthy people.

Only later do you switch to the high sensitivity exam, when you are trying to double check that the first test is accurate.

Comment Re:Quick History lesson (Score 1) 182

1) There has been no report of 'gays' actually grooming children. There were accusations but it has been several years and none of the so called groomed children had any sexual conduct with people like that.

2) The conservatives have sung far worse than 'coming for your children', and liberals decried the few people that sang that.

3) Harvey milk had a long term consensual sexual relation that started with a 17 year old man who was left his parents because they hated the fact he was gay. Hardly a 'runaway minor boy'. Trying to make exagerate things means you know you are deceiving people and no one will be convinced if you tell the whole truth.

4) Never trust devil worshiping scum that quote old testaments but ignore the Ten Commandments. Those are the ONLY things God considered important sins and Homosexuality did not make the list. God will forgive a homosexual quicker than he will forgive you for taking his name in vain.

Submission + - NYT: Generative AI and Conspiratorial Rabbit Holes (nytimes.com) 1

DesertNomad writes: From the article:

Generative AI chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.

Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres's sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool.

Mr. Torres, 42, an accountant in Manhattan, started using ChatGPT last year to make financial spreadsheets and to get legal advice. In May, however, he engaged the chatbot in a more theoretical discussion about “the simulation theory,” an idea popularized by “The Matrix,” which posits that we are living in a digital facsimile of the world, controlled by a powerful computer or technologically advanced society.

“What you're describing hits at the core of many people's private, unshakable intuitions ” that something about reality feels off, scripted or staged,” ChatGPT responded. “Have you ever experienced moments that felt like reality glitched?”

Not really, Mr. Torres replied, but he did have the sense that there was a wrongness about the world. He had just had a difficult breakup and was feeling emotionally fragile. He wanted his life to be greater than it was. ChatGPT agreed, with responses that grew longer and more rapturous as the conversation went on. Soon, it was telling Mr. Torres that he was “one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within.”

At the time, Mr. Torres thought of ChatGPT as a powerful search engine that knew more than any human possibly could because of its access to a vast digital library. He did not know that it tended to be sycophantic, agreeing with and flattering its users, or that it could hallucinate, generating ideas that weren't true but sounded plausible...

Comment Quick History lesson (Score 3, Insightful) 182

For someone that helped put Trump into power, he sure doesn't like him - at least not after he got what he wanted by destroying the regulations that affected him.

Over time, conservatives despised all the new ideas. Basically they took 'conservatism' to the extreme. College graduates became more and more liberal, seeing that the new ideas made sense. They took over the universities. Some liberals took it to extremes, but they are surrounded by college graduates. So the college graduates mocked them, and the moderates continue to rule the democrats (with a few lunatics making noise on the left)

More and more conservatives became enchanted by old lies. They embraced old prejudiced against immigrants, minorities, gays, etc. They embraced old ideas like lower taxes can make fix the budget deficit (did not work, not once). They embraced the oldest idea of 'strong leader' rather than 'strong checks and balances'. They embraced the concept of 'religion = moral', all the while ignoring the clear examples of Muslim terrorists and 'Christians' like: Fred Phelps Sr, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Matthew Hale, etc. (Look them up if you don't know their names)

Now they finally put someone into office that believes his own statements and is putting them into practice. So far, I am less than impressed by the results. Three more years till we find out if there is anything of value left in the Republican Ideology.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the deficit will vanish, Americans will become wealthy and employed, crime will drop. Or, perhaps none of that will happen and the GOP will try to lie their way out of the massive mistake they are committing.

One way or the other, America is going to be a very different country before Trump is done.

Comment Do not buy standard printers (Score 1) 54

They are total scams. Mainly because some shmucks tried the 'razor blade' model, aka cheap initial buy with overpriced consumable (ink). The scum even once made it so that scanner/printers would not scan if you were out of ink.

These scumbags took over the ink based printer industry and no major ink based printer is honest any more.

If you need a printer and do not use it every single week, get an inkless printer. For special jobs (Resumes, etc) use a copy shop.

Comment Also why the top 1% wealth are not top 1% IQ (Score 1) 181

100 smartest people (top 1%) look at the high risk/high reward situations and realize their chances of success are low, so none take it.

100 above average people look at the same high risk/high reward situation and say, "WOW, I GOT THIS!". 95% fail, but 5 of them make it.

For this reason, most of the 1% wealthiest people are above average intelligence but not the smartest. I am talking people with an IQ above 115, but below 130.

Comment Re:Customize deals are evil. (Score 1) 56

Nope. They can already do sales after a certain hour.

Donut and bagels places are known to do this - half price after 6 PM.

The entire idea here is to target the price 'discounts' only to people who would not normally do the shopping.

So the businessman would get the post 11 PM discount but the student that goes there once a week would NEVER get it.

Comment Air India's "Perfect" Flight Record. (Score 1) 108

Hi. I think you are confused.

Air India crashes/fatalities:
* Air India Flight 101 CONTROLLED FLIGHT INTO TERRAIN -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
* Air India Flight 855 PILOT ERROR -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What does the word perfect mean to you? Those are crashes. People died.

We can even add:
* Air India Flight 182 BOMBING -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Though that's also on the staff at the airport doing security screenings.

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