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

101–110 of 122 posts

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

#101

Post by amluto »

OskarS wrote: post #59
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 […

'as per Newton, Leibniz et al...' isn't good enough? Seriously though: if it is indeed true that you need to justify it this way, that is insane: this is just basic calculus. Do you have to justify every single statistics calculation also? Do you have to say 'as per Whoever et al' every time you calculate the standard deviation of something? What referee would object to 'estimating the area using the trapezoidal rule…

If one feels the need for a citation for something basic like this, a textbook works quite well. Pretty much any high school calculus textbook will have the necessary formulas.

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

#102

Post by jack_riminton »

gjm11 wrote: post #97
Xcelerate wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall seeing a breakdown of belief in God by discipline, and it was the opposite of what I would have expected. Abstract mathematicians were the most likely to believe in some form of God, followed by physicists, with biologists being the least likely to believe. Considering how complex and unpredictable biological science is compared to something like particle physics, I was surprised by this.

I don't think it should be surprising if biologists are the least likely group to believe in God. One common reason for believing in God is how ingeniously designed living things often are. The reason why this turns out not to be a very good reason is that evolution explains this better (dealing e.g. with cases where the design seems needlessly complex, malicious, etc.). Biologists are more familiar with evolution an…

I think the cause may be a lot more prosaic than all of that; namely that doctors are more likely to be the children of ambitious immigrants and are therefore more likely to be religious

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

#103

Post by vangelis »

airhead969 wrote: post #38
jack_riminton wrote: post #11

Tangental point here, but I find Medical student's relationship to Science quite fascinating. For instance there's a trend for medical students to believe less in evolution than other biology students EDIT: reference to it in this story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/21/religion.highe...

What frightens me is that osteopath magical thinkers (DOs) are allowed to practice medicine in the US just like MDs. They're glorified chiropractors!

Tell the AMA to allow more MDs.

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

#104

Post by jjk166 »

tacon wrote: post #87
tjs8rj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any examples? Not something I've ever noticed but would love to read about.

I think the Black-Scholes option pricing model reapplied a well known result from neutron transport in nuclear engineering.

Both the Black-Scholes formula and the Neutron Transport Equation are instances of the heat equation, which describes a wide variety of different phenomena.

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

#105

Post by mattkrause »

gjm11 wrote: post #97
Xcelerate wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall seeing a breakdown of belief in God by discipline, and it was the opposite of what I would have expected. Abstract mathematicians were the most likely to believe in some form of God, followed by physicists, with biologists being the least likely to believe. Considering how complex and unpredictable biological science is compared to something like particle physics, I was surprised by this.

I don't think it should be surprising if biologists are the least likely group to believe in God. One common reason for believing in God is how ingeniously designed living things often are. The reason why this turns out not to be a very good reason is that evolution explains this better (dealing e.g. with cases where the design seems needlessly complex, malicious, etc.). Biologists are more familiar with evolution an…

In a similar vein, a lot of "ingenious biological designs" turn out to be amazingly hacky close up.

The eye, for example, has blood vessels blocking some of the photoreceptors. A moderately intelligent designer wouldn't run the power cables directly in front of the camera's lens!

Or...maybe we're not made in His Image: cephalopods don't have this problem, after all. Cthulhu ftaghn....

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

#106

Post by mattkrause »

onorton wrote: post #13
cricci16 wrote: post #5

Google Scholar currently gives many more citations than 75 (424) source: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=it&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=A+Ma...

I wonder how many of those are from papers discussing failure of peer review or interdisciplinary communication rather than the value of the formula itself.

I would bet a few are also including it for the laughs....

(Tried to do this once with a tongue-in-cheek comment, but the whole section was cut for space).

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

#107

Post by jonesn11 »

I see the same thing in Applied Machine Learning, where psychologist X writes paper on "My mathematical model for predicting Intimate Partner Violence scores." Where the deep learning model is a basic multilayered perceptron implemented with sklearn. Something any CS Freshman could cook up in 10 minutes.

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

#108

Post by dang »

rollulus wrote: post #4

(2007). This has been posted here before a lot: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=discovers+integration

Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17863514 - Aug 2018 (33 comments)

Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11818833 - June 2016 (3 comments)

Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1964613 - Dec 2010 (120 comments)

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

#109

Post by curryst »

kgwgk wrote: post #56
hatmatrix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If they didn't they couldn't have used it and they wouldn't have needed a citation either. The point is that the "because the investigators were unable to cite an unpublished work, I submitted it for publication at their request" justification doesn't make much sense. She could have just explained to them that no citation was needed for something so trivial.

> The point is that the "because the investigators were unable to cite an unpublished work, I submitted it for publication at their request" justification doesn't make much sense. She could have just explained to them that no citation was needed for something so trivial.

I can see how if you were unaware, and several colleagues in your field were unaware, it might be good to include some kind of external information about the thing. I can also see why you might not want to link to Wikipedia.

I do think writing a medical article about it for people to link to is silly. Surely if you wanted a citation, you could just cite a math textbook.

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

#110

Post by throwawaygh »

jack_riminton wrote: post #67
OskarS wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance there's a trend for medical students to believe less in evolution than other biology students I don't find that particularly surprising, actually! I would assume that most subfields of biology relies more on deep understanding of evolution than medicine does. Like, if you're a botanist or entomologist or whatever, you need to have a very understanding of speciation and evolutionary pressure and whatnot…

Well they’re more likely to believe in God than the general public so yes that’s entirely possible https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/news/survey-shows...

Medical Doctors are members of a rich and powerful guild. Admission to the guild requires getting into medical schools. That in turn requires entering at least university (really high school) knowing how the pre-med game is played. For this reason, membership in the profession is more hereditary than most and is especially hard to achieve without knowing a doctor through family friends who can talk you through the process.

Also, in the USA, churches were historically important social institutions.

In a country of powerful religious institutions, members of a powerful guild with significant barriers to entry and therefore strong hereditary lines are often religious. That's not really at all surprising. At least to me.

Post reply on HN