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Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

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Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#71

Post by danparsonson »

noonespecial wrote: post #68
moconnor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then again, I've never named my case statements after myself. I bet you created a half-assed linked-list implementation and prefixed the class name with your initial, though ;)

Ooh spooky close. I was 14. I though I'd invented a whole new kind of array. I dubbed them k_arrays (for kickass arrays of course.) When I was 15 I took my first real programming course. Soon I was a bit sadder and much wiser. Fortunately, it was just part of the cirriculum. I managed to learn the lesson without ever displaying my shocking ignorance and bringing shame to my family for generations. (not to mention com…

Ah memories - I 'invented' a fully recursive compression algorithm when I was 14. Oddly enough it didn't work nearly so well in code as it did in my head, and the impossibility of successfully extracting an infinite variety of information from a few bytes didn't cross my mind :-)

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#72

Post by roel_v »

mbreese wrote: post #35
carbocation wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Doctors are usually trying to explain things to people who aren't going to know what modal means."

I talk to doctors quite often lately, with a daughter on the way and all, and the first few times I felt a bit miffed at what I took for her talking down to us. When it got to an absurd level with some nurses (who explained things like how to add several numbers by lining them up, putting a line underneath with a plus sign next to it, and then using a calculator to find the result (true story)), I thought about it some more and it must be because they need to target the lowest common denominator. Which I guess is someone with an iq of 85 or so, as people lower would get special counseling I think.

I've tried to find effective methods to communicate to people that they can skip some of the 'duh' parts, but that's not easy. Just saying 'listen I'm no dumb' or even worse, 'hi I'm and I'm a ' makes you look arrogant and will antagonize people, and they might not dumb it down on purpose anyway, so they might not have a way of not dumbing it down, either. Usually after a few talks people pick up the vibe on how fast you understand things and what you already know, but when you have many different contacts with various people it often not even comes to that point.

Anyway sorry for the OT ;)

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#73

Post by roel_v »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #60
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…

Of course you can average times of day, as well as wind directions. Express them as vectors on a 2-D plane, then separately average the components in each dimension. Although this is somewhat obvious in the case of wind measurements, it works for times of day as well if you think of them as points on a 24-hour clock face. Your medical friend was not checked out. She was busy stifling impolite laughter at your unfamil…

For time, what would then be the average of let's say 3 and 9 o'clock? Center of the clock I presume, but what does that mean in terms of time? Or would you then need to define the average of several points in time as a non-point in time?

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#74

Post by roel_v »

Slightly off topic, but the other day someone asked how to do well in academia. Well, interdisciplinary work like this is a great way to get many well-cited papers - be well-versed in two or three fields (a lot of work, but not very hard) and apply things from one to the other(s). Don't call it ''s Method' but just present it as something groundbreaking (which it even may be, in that new field).

You can generate a paper mill out of this after 10 or 15 years of studying the various fields (including undergrad and grad school) - it doesn't require much hard thinking, just a lot of work.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#75

Post by finton »

My outsider's opinion is that I think that a lot of cited articles are not always thoroughly examined, or of they are examined they are used to confirm the biases of a particular researcher.

I recently became interested in the idea of possible anesthetic neurotoxicity in infants and looked at a number of papers. The basic research seems solid, but the conclusions drawn are strangely inconsistent.

Neonatal rat, mouse and pregnant guinea pig models are used, and recent studies have been done on monkeys. It appears that there is a high incidence of cell death after exposure to anesthesia, but there is a relatively narrow window of vulnerability, which apparently peaks at 7 days postnatal in rats and rapidly diminishes. 5 day old monkeys were affected by prolonged exposure to ketamine, and 35 day old monkeys were not. Similar results were seen in guinea pigs.

What strikes me, is that this window of vulnerability is differently equated to human development by researchers, despite years of research into ethanol neurotoxicity (anesthetic studies seem to be more recent). Estimates for 7 to 14 day old rat-human equivalents range from pre-term infants to full-term newborns, to mid-gestation human fetuses and to children up to 3 years old. Two monkey papers, one using ketamine, and another using isoflurane also came up with different vulnerability periods based on similar data by using different sources of information on neurodevelopment, one published in the 1970's and one more recent.

I cannot understand how so many studies could have statements about possible windows of human neurotoxicity, without any certainty about what phase in neurodevelopment they were dealing with. And, oddly enough, the paper describing the model that is used to claim a mid-gestation vulnerability (based on a "bioinformatics approach") clearly states that it cannot be used to predict the "coordinated surge in synaptogenesis just prior to birth in primates", which is hypothesized to be the peak period of vulnerability to anesthetic-induced cell death. So why is it used as a source?

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#76

Post by Waywocket »

sliverstorm wrote: post #66
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…

Chasing down the source of the information, calling it into question, relating it to other things in the world-- these just weren't things she seemed to find pleasurable. Do you really want your doctor to be that sort of person? Do you want the person treating your kid for rickets to stand up and challenge the establishment and test a new hypothesis on the disease? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer it if the med…

>Do you really want your doctor to be that sort of person?

Are you joking? Abso-fucking-lutely I do.

Hell, I want everyone to be that sort of person. I contend that it is simply impossible for a person without those qualities to ever progress beyond 'adequate' at any task which is more than mechanical repetition of simple tasks.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#78

Post by nandemo »

jfager wrote: post #46
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…

Or she knew that the term "average" can just as validly refer to the mode as the mean, and was bored by the whole exercise.

I believe a sizeable proportion of HN users would benefit from reading these two articles by Philip Guo. I know I did.

Geek behaviors present during conversations

http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/geek-behaviors.htm

Social tips for geeks

http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/social-tips-for-geeks.htm

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#79

Post by ZeroGravitas »

roel_v wrote: post #72
mbreese wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Doctors are usually trying to explain things to people who aren't going to know what modal means." I talk to doctors quite often lately, with a daughter on the way and all, and the first few times I felt a bit miffed at what I took for her talking down to us. When it got to an absurd level with some nurses (who explained things like how to add several numbers by lining them up, putting a line underneath with a plus…

My wife just had the same experience and I likened it to me phoning a tech support line. Although it's frustrating they're not insulting your intelligence, they're probably just as sad as you are that they have to break it down to that level for most people.

And, as someone with minor experience on the other side of tech support, you can't really afford to believe someone when they say they know what they're doing, they're quite possibly lying. A great tip my colleague mentioned from his days on tech support: "Never ask someone to check if it's plugged in. They'll just get offended, assume it's plugged in without checking and tell you it is. Instead tell them that dust gets into the plugs sometimes so take it out, blow on it and put it back in. When they're doing that they discover it wasn't plugged in, and replace it, usually without bothering to tell you why it magically starts working again. Must be that pesky dust!"

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#80

Post by copper »

roel_v wrote: post #73
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you can average times of day, as well as wind directions. Express them as vectors on a 2-D plane, then separately average the components in each dimension. Although this is somewhat obvious in the case of wind measurements, it works for times of day as well if you think of them as points on a 24-hour clock face. Your medical friend was not checked out. She was busy stifling impolite laughter at your unfamil…

For time, what would then be the average of let's say 3 and 9 o'clock? Center of the clock I presume, but what does that mean in terms of time? Or would you then need to define the average of several points in time as a non-point in time?

0 o'clock could be interpreted as 12 o'clock too.
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