ronaldx

It's traditional in text adventures that you infer un-helped verbs from the text (that is, if the verb is clued at all): here the wizard instructs you to 'say' the answer.

Text adventures used to be hard!

That your parents and the parent commenter react in this way ("it's obvious") is by design of the author of the piece and the author of House.

I can watch an episode of House and anticipate "they obviously have lupus", which makes me feel intelligent and satisfied even though I can see they are planting obvious clues from the very start which a diagnostician would be mind-numbingly stupid to ignore.

The same with the headline of this article. It's designed that way. In reality, you don't get to read the headline or watch the episode before making a clinical decision.

Regarding House: in mid-series episodes, I believe they occasionally subvert this by planting clues for the wrong thing. At least, I enjoyed being wrong in those episodes.

True in theory, but unlikely to the point of irrelevant.

Assuming chromosomes are inhereted whole, the probability that siblings share less than 25% DNA - the equivalent of one further generation away - is 0.00531 (0.5% chance).

But chromosomes are not inherited whole - they recombine. This hugely reduces the probability even from that start point.

Mitochondrial DNA between twins is expected to be almost identical, but you and I also have extremely similar mitochondria: since it doesn't recombine and rarely mutates. So, you have to get to a much deeper level to identify the differences.

Even if it's now possible/cheap, that's a recent development.

mtDNA is good for finding your (maternal) ancestral group, less so for your immediate relatives.

I see no reason why a mitochondrial DNA test would be helpful - your point is that the mitochondria are maternally inherited?

1. Mitochondrial DNA is less apt than regular DNA to accurately identify motherhood since it has a low mutation rate.

2. The mitochondria would still come from the chimeric cells which still are a generation away from the mother's cells.

3. If you have have considered the possibility of chimerism, there are much simpler tests - e.g. the tests that they did do.

The ova all come from the germline so IMHO it's overwhelmingly likely they would have the same DNA but it's not exactly guaranteed: it depends if her ovaries are chimeric.

Apologies for editing my point above.

Chimerism is well-studied because it's biologically interesting, but most social/medical professionals are not expected to come across human chimerism in their whole career.

Chimerism not often documented in humans and the other possibilities (e.g. surrogacy scam) are hugely more probable explanations.

It's not uneducated to use Occam's razor: if someone tests as not being the mother, they almost always are not the mother. This is an every day occurrence.

Chimerism is a possible explanation but vanishingly unlikely. Two identified cases, ever (i.e. none before this).

This is news because it's exceptional.

This article doesn't totally add up.

If the mother was chimeric, she would be chimeric with a 'twin' from the same (grand)mother and father. Therefore her 'twin' chimera would share 50% of her DNA, as any regular sibling.

This would be identifiable on a DNA test as a close relative: she would be genetically equivalent to an aunt rather than a mother.

It's also surprising that they had to test the thyroid when the gametic cell line is the important one (wikipedia suggests they tested her cervix).

Great, thanks :)

It is not exactly clear (on the website) what you mean by 'rejected', so the English text could be improved to make your meaning more explicit. Perhaps 'returned' would be better?

Good luck!

So stuff which appears to be spam is bounced, with a return message.

On reflection, this does seem like a better system. I had imagined a silent fail as per other popular e-mail hosts.

"A lot of advice says to only accept jobs which are willing to pay the rate you're offering..."

IMHO the rule is good, but you don't have to offer the same rate for each job. If there's a job that benefits you, work out what how much that benefits you and quote the appropriate rate. If there's a job that doesn't benefit you, double your normal rate.

Clients insisting on negotiating the rate is a negative signal. It may be a signal that they don't value your work at the rate you're quoting, and this is often a signal that they won't value your work. It may be a signal that they are under financial pressure (i.e. it's high risk for you). Better clients might ask for a discount but normally will agree if you stick to the quoted rate.

I do not understand the Legal Certainty paragraph.

My interpretation is: Spam is deleted in order to give you plausible deniability that you haven't received and read it.

i.e. There is no spam folder.

But, this seems like it would normally be a bug rather than a feature.

You can also pass the test this way by having "generous" judges contributing to the 1/3, which is likely because the judges are not impartial: they are emotionally invested in being part of a positive result. I wonder how Kevin Warwick himself voted, for example.

A more correct test (which admittedly doesn't cover this issue) would be to give each judge a conversation with one human and one computer, and for them to say which one they believe is the human.

Chances are you don't get to be a (self-made) billionaire without throwing away $5k here and there.

If you're spending your time saving easily recoverable $5ks, you might get to be a millionnaire but you will never get to be a billionaire: it's totally irrelevant on that scale.

Equivalent statement: You don't get to buy a house without picking pound coins up off the street.

Suppose you are one of London's 72 resident billionaires, and you're making 5% or so on your income.

You can pay for this digger in an hour, by spending that hour sitting on your ass, and it's not that you will be re-spending that money in your lifetime anyway. Fill it in or have someone salvage it, do whichever is quicker: you've got other things to do with your life and one of those things is to enjoy your new pool.

(Whether true or not, this acts as a good illustration of the scale of income inequality)

I can't really understand the effort of deleting everything either. I highly doubt Google ever really deletes anything. Once you've sent it to their servers, the cat is out of the bag.

There are presumably technical differences in how this data is stored and processed over time, which may not be insignificant.

Delete data today and it might be wiped; delete data tomorrow and it might be parcelled into a company takeover.

The ancient ancestor of the first black widow might not have been some peculiar middle ground between benign and lethal, yet the random mutation of offspring which proliferated merely happened to be highly deadly.

This is possible but not very likely in reality.

We expect evolution to be incremental, for the following reasons:

First of all, it's very unlikely that any mutation would get to "Surprise! Lethal!" venom unless the species is already geared up to produce something venom-like, and also to store venom and to protect itself from its own venom. There's a whole bunch of new functions that are needed to be venomous, and it's vanishingly unlikely that they will all suddenly appear at the same time, even at evolutionary scale.

IMO mutations normally have small positive effects and large negative effects: they are more likely to delete or - if you're lucky - alter some existing function and very unlikely to build a whole new function (compare: a small random change to your computer code).

Even if super-lethal venom was to somehow appear overnight, then in order to reach 100% prevalence it must provide such an immediate advantage that the non-lethal spiders die out and only super-lethal spiders proliferate.

But the non-lethal spiders were surviving pretty well in order to reach that point. So, there's no reason to believe the non-lethal spiders were in particular danger or that lethal venom was needed - normally, the "Surprise! Lethal!" variant line would just quietly die out (as almost all variants do) leaving the wild non-lethal type.

As I say, the random mutation explanation is possible but not really practical.

A far more plausible scenario is an "arms race" - where venomous functions develop over time, while predators and prey develop immunity over time - as the predators (honey badger) start evolving coping mechanisms, stronger venom is needed.

I would have thought nature would stop optimizing once a sting is a good enough deterrent.

I believe you are probably right about this: but the spider venom was probably developed in an arms race with some {predator/prey} species. In your 'tarantula hawk' example, the venom must work on the tarantula, and the tarantula must do its evolutionary best to protect itself from the venom. This combination allows the venom to become extremely effective.

Or, given that it's the black "widow", maybe the venom is a result of sexual selection[0], which tends to have crazily extreme results. A spider fetish, if you like.

But, the sting/venom is not designed for humans (it just happens to work on them), and humans as a species have no reason to develop better protection. Humans typically aren't a target of the bites and almost always recover with no long-term effect. It isn't really designed to work on humans. But, it still hurts (and maybe that's a nice side benefit for a reclusive spider).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection

Worse than that: it's very easy and almost always correct to predict that a startup will fail.

But... paying someone to make that prediction (even if you largely trust their authority) is not actually helpful.

Your reputation with this site is essentially no more than internet points. Your work, your experience, and your ability stays with you.

The ultimate goal of any agency-type business is to take the maximum amount of money from their clients while doing the least possible amount of work for them. If the clients feel locked-in (as you do), that's brilliant for them, because they can abuse you in this way and they know you won't change your behaviour apart from grumbling on some forum.

Although others are suggesting you use a competitor, I think you should consider whether this is a business model you want to support in the future.

I took a chance on signing up even though it was my instinct to run... my reward was the next screen:

"We're sorry but something went wrong"

That's an immediate double fail on the "simplest way to make a wiki" headline.

I agree with what you say.

To correctly compare the variances, the scale should be adjusted according to the square root of the ratio of sample sizes.

The author has not done this correctly, but I claim that zeroing the axis would be further from the correct graph.

1. The fact that you/others expect women to behave in a sexually titillating way for men is not 'cuts both ways' discrimination, except that it degrades everyone.

2. High school students deserve to be respected.

Your comment disgusts me.

I think putting sexy guys having fun on a party invite would make exactly as much sense as this one.

Of everything that you've said on this topic, I agree only with this sentence; neither makes any sense.

P.S. They've unbuttoned their shirts so you can see their muscular pecs. (Note carefully: in my example, they were never shirtless.)

very much illegal in the UK.

I question this. Neither I nor Wikipedia should be used for legal advice, but there are exceptions to discrimination law, and the parent's comment seems to precisely meet one of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_employment_discrimination_l...

No answer to my question but you ask your own? IMO you're wilfully avoiding the point about the appropriateness of sexualised imagery in general, but nonetheless I'll answer your question: from the original source.

http://bluesky.chicagotribune.com/chi-techweek-chicago-contr...

"Gather with us as we celebrate the launch of our charity initiative with Urban Alliance, the only year long employment program for under resourced high school seniors in Chicago." Excuse any transcription error.

I believe "1st annual" has a specific meaning which you seem to have missed.

I don't see what good will come of this, but I will try genuinely to help you nonetheless.

Would you be happy (rather than surprised) to see a photo of two male models on your invite to this event in the same style? Maybe with their shirts undone to their waist, sharing a kiss, anything that's approximately equivalent?

If not, you might like to consider why that choice of image would be uncomfortable for you and that this particular choice of image might be uncomfortable for others.

If you bite the bullet (well done!), there are further problems. This is an event to launch a high school seniors employment initiative. High school and sexualised imagery don't belong together.

The author points out in the text that the NFL result is statistically significant and the NBA result is not.

A larger random sample ought to fall closer to the line than a smaller sample: it would be statistically highly remarkable if the graphs did look similar with zeroed axes - the larger sample should look much flatter.

Starting both graphs from zero is unhelpful if the goal is correct visual interpretation.