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Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

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Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#81

Post by eru »

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…

You can do that for wind, but what does it mean?

An equally valid measure for wind would be to take the absolutes, and average their squares. That'll give you a measure of the average energy in the wind.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#82

Post by DougBTX »

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?

Hand waving: I'm guessing that you could make a new vector from the average x and the average y. The direction would indicate the average time, and the length would indicate the certainty, so a length of zero would mean total uncertainty.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#83

Post by rmc »

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 the doctor was splitting the clock in half hour chunks (or similar). "born at 3am" probably means "born between 2:45am and 3:15am". If a baby was born at 3:02am, the next day they will say "I got no sleep, a baby was born at 3am last night!".

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#84

Post by roel_v »

copper wrote: post #80
roel_v wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The GP explicitly specified a 24-hour clock face, plus even on a 12-hour clock the question would remain.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#85

Post by roel_v »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #79
roel_v wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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, t…

Yeah I think it's the same, you get to deal with all sorts of folk. My father in law is a doctor but he started out as a pathologist, as he always says - 'at least I didn't have to deal with all those sick people' ;)

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#86

Post by crocowhile »

kwantam wrote: post #20
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…

Sure, it's completely fair. We all reinvent the wheel sometimes. That hilarious part is that this paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal--- and none of the reviewers realized that he'd rediscovered some 17th century math.

"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." — James D. Watson

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#87

Post by btilly »

kwantam wrote: post #20
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…

Sure, it's completely fair. We all reinvent the wheel sometimes. That hilarious part is that this paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal--- and none of the reviewers realized that he'd rediscovered some 17th century math.

And furthermore it came as news enough to other researchers that the paper got cited many times.

But rediscovering some old math doesn't make it that bad. I've rediscovered old math before, and it was something that mathematicians around me thought was interesting because they hadn't seen it before either. What makes this particularly egregious is that everyone involved theoretically took a course that not only described this exact technique, but which described an even better one! (Simpson's rule.)

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#88

Post by Vivtek »

Waywocket wrote: post #76
sliverstorm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Second this. Especially in medicine; not to go tl;dr on everybody again about my son's kidney disease, but our search through seven nephrologists stopped when we finally found one capable of looking at his case in a non-recipe-based manner.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#89

Post by Vivtek »

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?

You'd have to talk about a time vector, with your case being the zero-length vector, or "no preference". Then a vector with a longer extent would indicate a "strong preference". Something like the standard deviation or something in a linear measure, I guess.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#90

Post by fluidcruft »

brianlash wrote: post #2

I think Michael Williams (third comment) has the right idea when he says "I’m sure you can find plenty of physicists saying spectacularly naive things about medicine...". Of course OP's discovery is amusing - even alarming - but approaching it with an air of condescension won't do much to advance either field.

Did someone mention Kurzweil and his army of computer science yes men?
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