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

Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

fliptomato.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 124 posts

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#31

Post by carbocation »

jrockway wrote: post #29
carbocation wrote: post #13

For my next New England Journal paper, I'm going to use a random number generator to simulate whether conditional, probabilistic health outcomes occurred or not. I'll cycle through this thousands of times to obtain stable estimates, and then call this the Monte Carbocation method.

Incidentally, you'll also be able to use this technique to determine the area under a curve! Let's patent it together and get rich!

Let's trademark it and copyright it, too!

Now we just need to find a coder to implement our great idea.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#32

Post by carbocation »

mbm wrote: post #16
kenjackson wrote: post #11

Here's another paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7677819 "Tal's Formula is the Trapezoidal Rule" A rebuttal doesn't get much blunter than that.

It's intriguing that the author's two-page rebuttal is among her 'selected publications'. http://www.sph.unc.edu/nciph/jane_monaco_1990_1984.html

The two page rebuttal that was written by Jane Monaco is among Jane Monaco's selected publications. (You linked us to Jane Monaco's page, not Mary Tai's.)

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#33

Post by jamesbritt »

nostrademons wrote: post #27
dmlorenzetti wrote: post #21

The author calls out med students for approaching physics through rote memorization. It reminds me of an experience my older brother and I had with a doctor friend. Our friend, an OB/GYN, mentioned how hard her work is, because "the average baby is born at 3am." We laughed, but then my brother asked, "What does 'average' mean when you have a 24-hour clock? It must mean the modal time or something like that." I contri…

Unless you're House, apparently. I've always wondered how accurate that show really is...

http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#34

Post by kes »

nostrademons wrote: post #27
dmlorenzetti wrote: post #21

The author calls out med students for approaching physics through rote memorization. It reminds me of an experience my older brother and I had with a doctor friend. Our friend, an OB/GYN, mentioned how hard her work is, because "the average baby is born at 3am." We laughed, but then my brother asked, "What does 'average' mean when you have a 24-hour clock? It must mean the modal time or something like that." I contri…

Unless you're House, apparently. I've always wondered how accurate that show really is...

Now you will know: http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#35

Post by mbreese »

carbocation wrote: post #30
dmlorenzetti wrote: post #21

The author calls out med students for approaching physics through rote memorization. It reminds me of an experience my older brother and I had with a doctor friend. Our friend, an OB/GYN, mentioned how hard her work is, because "the average baby is born at 3am." We laughed, but then my brother asked, "What does 'average' mean when you have a 24-hour clock? It must mean the modal time or something like that." I contri…

The charitable interpretation (for your OB friend) is that she was not speaking literally, and got bored when you started perseverating on her hyperbole. The more likely explanation is that your analysis is indeed correct.

I'd say the more likely case is that she wasn't speaking literally. Doctors are usually trying to explain things to people who aren't going to know what modal means. Couple that with the fact that most doctors know just enough statistics to get by, and "the most common time for a baby to be born is 3am" gets translated to "the average baby is born at 3am".

The bored look was probably just her rolling her eyes.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#36

Post by aaronbrethorst »

noonespecial wrote: post #17

I'd laugh a lot harder when people struggle for days and then reach a half-assed piece of some algorithm that's completely well know if I hadn't been there a dozen times myself. Programmers are especially vulnerable to this. Who hasn't made a 4 page case statement when 3 lines of recursion would have done it, especially when starting out? Then again, I've never named my case statements after myself. No matter how bri…

I hear that. I once spent the better part of a day reinventing ActiveRecord's serialize class method (with tests!) only to be told by a friend that I had, uh, reinvented an existing method.

I can't imagine spending months on a peer-reviewed paper accomplishing the same amount of nothing. That would be disheartening to say the least.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#37

Post by mbreese »

Leptosiphon wrote: post #23
frisco wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calculus is taught in high school and expected to be basic knowledge for any physician, even if they don't use it often, and especially so for researchers. Calculus is fair game on their admissions exam, even! On the other hand, there's never an expectation that physicists know medicine.

Calculus is not taught to everyone in high school. Many students only make it as far as precalculus and many more, even if they take calculus in high school do not learn integration. At the college level, many biology students do not take calculus. As far as calculus being a requirement for entrance into med school, in many cases I am afraid you are incorrect. http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/additional_math_reqs.…

Calculus, per se, isn't a requirement, but physics is covered pretty heavily on the MCAT. And last I checked, you needed calculus for college level physics.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#38

Post by mbreese »

alphaoverlord wrote: post #12

Just to be clear, and this might be tangential, but she is not a physician - I think she is a dietitian. I think its a fallacy to assume that only physicians publish in medical journals and there is a negligible link between over-the-top premeds and this article. Mary M. Tai www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/54/5/783.pdf http://journals.lww.com/topicsinclinicalnutrition/Citation/1... I can't access the article, so I can't mak…

We found the same link... and you're correct, she isn't a physician.

In the Topics in Clinical Nutrition 1992 paper, she is listed as having an MS and an EdD. So, it's safe to say that she probably didn't realize that she was describing integration.

The entire post had a "I'm smarter than you" chip on your shoulder type of vibe.

It should also be noted that this paper had a number of letters to the editor about it, so in this case, I'd say that the process works (even if it got by the editors).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8137688

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#40

Post by ehsanul »

carbocation wrote: post #32
mbm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's intriguing that the author's two-page rebuttal is among her 'selected publications'. http://www.sph.unc.edu/nciph/jane_monaco_1990_1984.html

The two page rebuttal that was written by Jane Monaco is among Jane Monaco's selected publications. (You linked us to Jane Monaco's page, not Mary Tai's.)

That is what the GP thought was interesting. So do I.
Post reply on HN