Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

fliptomato.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 122 posts

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#71

Post by geocrasher »

From the article: "this paper is perhaps an important example of the importance of interdisciplinary communication."

Indeed. Even within the medical field, huge amounts of progress are never materialized just because the guy who deals with the brain never talks to the guy who deals with the gut. They have another guy who deals with the nervous system who knows little about the brain OR the gut. And you get referrals to all of these, and they contradict each other and argue (by proxy of you) about the best way to treat the thing that none of them fully knows anything about.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#72

Post by quercusa »

lqet wrote: post #69
zucker42 wrote: post #51

By the way, the way she found the "true value" of the integral to verify her method was to graph it on graph paper and count the squares underneath.

Surely that is more practical than cutting out the area, finding out the paper weight per square inch and weighting it?!

You'd probably want to do that on heavy stock or cardboard, with big squares to minimize weighing errors. That's what lab assistants are for, right?

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#73

Post by newswasboring »

opaque wrote: post #34
newswasboring wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was really on the author's side till I read these responses. Initially in my head it was just a case of misunderstanding or ignorance, but through her letters she has made clear that she thinks it is significant enough. This is borne out by her tone which is palpatably aggressive and contradictory at some points. She says she didn't publish this model for glory, but she also named it after herself. Also, no effort…

> She says she didn't publish this model for glory, but she also named it after herself. She didn't name it after herself, the users did: > collegues ... began using it and addressed it as "Tai's formula" As is typically the way with eponymous scientific works, people citing the work add the author's name e.g. Maxwell's equations or Higgs' boson. The author doesn't typically declare "I have discovered X, which I shal…

I have published multiple photonics papers and contributed to many and nobody has ever had the need to provide a citation for maxwell's equations. I would consider it reference padding if you do. Point is people could still have used the term without her publishing it. Also, am I supposed to take her word for it, at least she could have cited somewhere which tried to use it and give her credit. This seems like if anyone uses trapezoidal method she would take credit because nobody had a citation so everyone was just using "Tai's model".

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#74

Post by pfortuny »

hatmatrix wrote: post #31
newswasboring wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was really on the author's side till I read these responses. Initially in my head it was just a case of misunderstanding or ignorance, but through her letters she has made clear that she thinks it is significant enough. This is borne out by her tone which is palpatably aggressive and contradictory at some points. She says she didn't publish this model for glory, but she also named it after herself. Also, no effort…

> And I don't understand why people would need a citation instead of just saying its calculated using the trapezoidal rule. They didn't know the trapezoidal rule.

Well, yes, but if you need a citation for Gaussian elimination, the problem is yours, not anyone else's.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#75

Post by pfortuny »

stuartbman wrote: post #26

I think it's important to note why the 75 citations isn't just 75 dummies who also haven't heard of integration. If you're writing a diabetes paper and want to use integration for your analysis (even if you are fully aware of its background), you'll be forced to justify your approach and defend it's applicability to diabetes. Far easier to say 'as per Tai et al...' and take it as given. You see this a lot- 'we used […

Well, tell that to World of Science, or Scopus, or the h-index.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#77

Post by JoeAltmaier »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #76

Isn't basic calculus a mandatory high school course? How would such a scholarly person be entirely unaware of calculus? Edit: I'm surprised, but it's quite impressive to have discovered the same concept Newton did, all on your own!

Nope

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#79

Post by wl »

airhead969 wrote: post #64
dreamcompiler wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Osteopaths in the UK and most other countries are quacks. Osteopaths in the US are real physicians. This is not a trick of labeling: In the US osteopath training is a science-based, rigorous medical program identical to that of an MD. Yes DOs are also trained in the historical "chiropractic"-like stuff, but most of the ones I know deemphasize that in practice.

Why have it at all? It's magical thinking like religion that needs to be debunked and obliterated. Religion and quackery have no place in scientific medicine!

In practice, it serves the purpose of letting less academically accomplished students become physicians without resorting to Caribbean medical schools. This isn't a net negative to society because much of the overachievement in the pre-med set is overlearning the game, not genuine accomplishment.

Talking to people who have gone to osteopathic medical schools, it seems like the true believers there have enough clout that they're not transforming into normal medical schools any time soon. But OMM is such a small part of the curriculum, it's not a huge burden for the majority of students who think it's nonsense.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)

#80

Post by jplr8922 »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #22

In the next issue, the journal published a bunch of letters noting that she had rediscovered the trapezoid rule. https://kconrad.math.uconn.edu/math1132s20/handouts/taicomme... Mary Tai herself also replied and explained the background to the paper a bit more: > While a doctoral candidate working on my dissertation at Columbia University in 1981, I needed to calculate total area under a curve. During a session with m…

Have you ever spent 10min of your life with a doctor in an interpersonal setting? These people are probably the most intelectually insecure group in our society. We put them on a pedestal non-stop, the average grades in their classes are all A+, super-high wages and status, etc. From my point of view, this behaviour fits my expectation of them.
Post reply on HN