cant_kant

Sensible doctors do not believe drug company marketing.

I get large amounts of ad-junk from drug companies that ends up unread in the bin. I refuse to meet with drug company representatives. I smile politely at them if I bump into them in the corridor and suggest that they leave their ad-junk with my secretary. My staff then file their ad-junk in the trash bin.

On Friday, I had a drug company representative attempt to tell me ( he was hanging around my coffee area ) about the joys of Targin, a fixed-dose combination of oxycodone and naloxone. I gently shook him off, and directed him to my secretary.

Drug company representatives are usually decent human beings with lives and families. However they are poorly educated, poorly informed salesmen and women with sales targets to meet and product managers to keep happy. Even worse, they and the drug company have no accountability if a patient dies because of their recommendations. If avoidable death supervenes or if there are non-lethal complications or even just therapeutic failure, I am accountable.

Instead of relying on marketing, I rely on information from good, well performed randomised controlled studies published in reputable peer reviewed journals ( I like the NEJM ) and on meta-analyses of these. I view the results of these through a filter of scepticism, cynicism, pragmatism and a modicum of hope.

Many of my colleagues do likewise. I trust that you do the same in your respective vocations. Regrettably, there is a bell curve. I am sure that the drug companies find enough gullible prescribers out in the wild for their purposes.

Two years late. HGST has been shipping helium filled HDDs since 2014.

If the paper is retracted, do the publishers give a refund ? See http://retractionwatch.com/ to see the massive number of retractions that happen.

"The Journal‘s reporting suggests that Theranos had been falsifying lab records to make it look like its own proprietary gear was as reliable as the industry standard.

Documents from health care inspectors also seem to show that this kind of stuff was happening.

If the DOJ concludes that Theranos was charging money for a test it knew was not accurate, that would violate health care laws, and could earn people prison time." http://www.wired.com/2016/04/theranos-investigated-fraud-wei...

School is only incidentally about education. For instance, never underestimate the power of networking at a elite private school.

A few random stories, all true:

A client of mine is global <role_deleted_to_protect_anonymity> director of a multi-billion dollar Scandinavian corporation largely because a school friend knew a few board members.

A friend obtained deep access to a person, considered to be among the five most powerful people in his country, due to his school network.

Another friend was contacted by a school friend and helped him to land a job in an elite investment bank despite the lack of any relevant experience.

Kyle Vogt said: "This is false."

Talk to your lawyer before posting on social media.

Interesting stories. Better copy editing would make them easier to read.

"Ed had shouted on them like this"

"No real kidnapper hauls around a struggling, scream-seeking captive"

"I see I need to show the adolescent asshole affecting to be me "

Broken sentences like these make the stories a bit of a chore to read.

"A long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee encryption bill would force companies to provide “technical assistance” to government investigators seeking locked data, according to a discussion draft obtained by The Hill."

Full pdf text of the bill from Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) follows: https://www.scribd.com/doc/307378123/Burr-Encryption-Bill-Di...

What is wrong with using TeX ?

MathML is reinventing the wheel. Only, the MathML wheel is square, flat and breaks when used.

" Dyson did pioneer the bagless vacuum cleaners Dyson did pioneer the bagless vacuum cleaners"

On the contrary bagless vacuum cleaners have existed since the 1920's, around 20 years before Sir James Dyson OM CBE FRS FREng was born.

As for cyclonic vacuum cleaners Filter Queen have been making cyclonic vacuum cleaners since 1930. http://www.filterqueen.com/ourstories.php

Dyson is the Bose of vacuum cleaners, excelling in hyping their products to the gullible.

By doing that, they perform a number of valuable functions. They return profits to shareholders; they keep their staff employed ;they part the proverbial fool from his money.

Here is a detailed quantitative comparision of the Dysons to another more conventional brand. https://www.greatvacs.com/education/KirbyVsDysonVacuumReview...

"In April and May 2015, a test to measure prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, failed quality-control checks 22% of the time. The PSA test is used to help detect prostate cancer."

Ouch.... I see a string of class action suits in the future.

I propose that facebook() be put into the public kernel

For the secret* kernel that is known only to us, facebook () should be replaced by hn().

"Maybe it was just a different time."

Ellison's 200 million dollar house set on 23 acres, suggests that selective memory might be playing a role.

The graph accompanying the article indicates that we need a global campaign to persuade more men to do "studio.art.drawing".

At the very least, we need an article in the Communications of the ACM on the Top 10 Myths About Teaching Studio.Art.Drawing.

Did Craig Wright come to the Satoshi Roundtable ?

" a library for processing for the THAMIL language " ?

I know of it as Tamil.

I read the WSJ, FT, NYT, RCP, and The Hill if I want exposure to the "media". And HN for light entertainment.

There is no way that I would look at inane posturing on Yahoo's blogs.

Yahoo has digital magazines ?

Why would a search company have junk like that ?

How much other worthless baggage do they have ?

Link to the full order:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2714005/SB-Shoote...

It is a PDF.

The key parts of the Federal order:

"Apple's reasonable technical assistance shall accomplish the following three important functions:

(1) it will bypass or disable the auto-erase function whether or not it has been enabled;

(2) it will enable the FBI to submit passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE for testing electronically via the physical device port, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or other protocol available on the SUBJECT DEVICE and

(3) it will ensure that when the FBI submits passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE, software running on the device will not purposefully introduce any additional delay between passcode attempts beyond what is incurred by Apple hardware.

Apple's reasonable technical assistance may include, but is not limited to: providing the FBI with a signed iPhone Software file, recovery bundle, or other Software Image File ("SIF") that can be loaded onto the SUBJECT DEVICE.

The SIF will load and run from Random Access Memory and will not modify the iOS on the actual phone, the user data partition or system partition on the device's flash memory. The SIF will be coded by Apple with a unique identifier of the phone so that the SIF would only load and execute on the SUBJECT DEVICE.

The SIF will be loaded via Device Firmware Upgrade ("DFU") mode, recovery mode, or other applicable mode available to the FBI. Once active on the SUBJECT DEVICE, the SIF will accomplish the three functions specified in paragraph 2. The SIF will be loaded on the SUBJECT DEVICE at either a government facility, or alternatively, at an Apple facility; if the latter, Apple shall provide the government with remote access to the SUBJECT DEVICE through a computer allowing the government to conduct passcode recovery analysis.

If Apple determines that it can achieve the three functions stated above in paragraph 2, as well as the functionality set forth in paragraph 3, using an alternate technological means from that recommended by the government, and the government concurs, Apple may comply with this Order in that way."

Automatically indicting parents of abducted children follows as one consequence.

By that impeccable logic, victims of homicide only have themselves to blame.

The Financial Times says:

"Nonetheless, one person close to the company said the sale price was lower than investors might have hoped for a couple of years ago, when Swiftkey was among the most popular smartphone apps in the world."

It is an unfortunately timed exit.

If they had sold even a year ago, they could have done much better.

The original line from the editorial was: " There is concern among some front-line researchers that the system will be taken over by what some researchers have characterized as “research parasites.” This issue of the Journal offers a product of data sharing that is exactly the opposite. The new investigators arrived on the scene with their own ideas and worked symbiotically, rather than parasitically, with the investigators holding the data, moving the field forward in a way that neither group could have done on its own. "

I do not read that as the editor calling researchers parasites. Rather, the editorial is exploring different ways of data sharing and collaboration.

See the NEJM editorial that sparked the controvery at http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1516564

The blog post appears to go to some effort to misinterpret the editorial.

"The head of the police authority review board just resigned.

An off-the-books police facility where over 7,000 people were taken and had their rights trampled was uncovered.

So many people were tortured by the Chicago Police Department that a reparations fund was created.

So many people were wrongfully convicted that the city has now been labeled the "false confession capital of the world.""

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-chicago-police...

"After a year in limbo, the Navy has decided to move ahead and replace the service's top intelligence officer, whose tenure has been hamstrung by suspected ties to a disgraced defense contracting firm.

The Office of the Secretary of the Navy has nominated Rear Adm. Elizabeth Train for a third star and to relieve Vice Adm. Ted Branch as director of naval intelligence, according to two Navy officials.

Branch's access to classified information was suspended in November 2013, along with that of a deputy, Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, the director of intelligence operations, for possible connections to Glenn Defense Marine Asia — the husbanding firm at the center of one of the Navy's biggest bribery scandals in decades." http://www.navytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2014/11/26/...

"... Navy officials boarded and relieved Capt. Daniel P. Dusek of his command of the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard. Fifteen months later on January 15, 2015, federal prosecutors obtained a guilty plea from Dusek on charges of bribery for supplying classified ship movements in the Asia-Pacific region to Glenn Marine in return for prostitutes and luxury hotel stays worth over $10,000. Dusek arranged for the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and the amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu to stop at ports where Francis' firm could service the ships. Dusek was released on $200,000 bail pending his sentencing hearing set for April 3, 2015. The previous week, on January 2, 2015, Cmdr. Jose Luis Sanchez pleaded guilty to supplying secret ship movement schedules in return for prostitutes, luxury travel and $100,000 in cash over a four year period."

And the letter to Facebook from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. http://trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/Miscelleneus/Document/20160... ( pdf )

Poor countries are not necessarily Facebook-fodder.

"Trai [ the Indian telecoms regulator] criticises Facebook for “reducing this meaningful consultative exercise designed to produce informed decisions in a transparent manner into a crudely majoritarian and orchestrated opinion poll” and for claiming to speak on behalf of the users who were told to respond to the consultation without, er, being shown any of the questions:

Equally of concern is your self-appointed spokesmanship on behalf of those who have sent responses to TRAI using your platform. IT is noticed that you have not been authorized by your users to speak on behalf of them collectively. No disclosure in the act of sending a message to TRAI using your platform to this effect has been issued to users. The only act to which such users have consented is the following: ‘By clicking Send Email, you agree to let Facebook send your name and this email to the TRAI.’

This does not in our view imply any consent on the part of the user to allow Facebook to speak on their behalf as you have done, urging TRAI to hear ‘the voice of these millions of Indians.’"

Serum nucleic acid sampling to screen for malignancies has a few problems. One issue is that it runs into the realities of Bayes theorem.

You may want to consider what happened to Pathway Genomics. Their screening test claiming to detect 10 cancers in healthy people drew the ire of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration past year, which sent the company a letter saying:

"We have [...] examined published literature and have not found any published evidence that this test or any similar test has been clinically validated as a screening tool for early detection of cancer in high risk individuals," the letter states.

... We have reviewed the information presented on your website in the white paper, entitled “Liquid Biopsy for the Detection and Monitoring of Cancer: Analysis of 96 Hotspot Mutations via Plasma Derived Circulating Tumor DNA,” dated September 2015. It is unclear how the literature that you cited, addressing the presence of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in already-diagnosed patients, is adequate to support the expansive claims of screening for early cancer detection using ctDNA in undiagnosed patients for up to 10 different cancers with the CancerInterceptTM Detect...

We believe you are offering a high risk test that has not received adequate clinical validation and may harm the public health.."

For the full letter from the FDA, see http://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/ResourcesforYou/... ( it is a pdf )

"Considering the standard deviation for IQ is 15 points"

The standard deviation for the distribution of IQ is 15 points.

The standard deviation of the errors of measurement associated with measuring IQ is 3 points.( ie: the standard error of measurement aka SEM)

I would be willing to have 3 fingers of my left hand ( not including my thumb ) amputated to improve my IQ by 1 standard deviation.

For more on Standard Error of Measurement, see http://www.csus.edu/indiv/b/brocks/Courses/EDS%20245/Handout...