Nature blog: Virginia moves toward Personhood for embryos http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/02/virginia-moves-toward-personhood.html
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“[...] the only way to get objective data is to have institutions that assume objectivity doesn’t exist. It’s not enough to force scientists and doctors to declare conflicts of interest, because our biases seep in anyway. Rather, we need to do a better job of funding truly independent studies and approaching with extra skepticism those that are not. We should also encourage researchers to make their raw data public, as Samuel Morton did, so that others can check it. As Stephen Jay Gould proved all too well, men are inveterate mismeasurers.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303936704576397771567839728.html
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mazsa
How we come to know our bodies as our own http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/cp-hwc061411.php
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A simple, unpatentable cancer treatment?
“DCA is an odourless, colourless, inexpensive, relatively non-toxic, small molecule. And researchers at the University of Alberta believe it may soon be used as an effective treatment for many forms of cancer.
Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, a professor at the U of A Department of Medicine, has shown that dichloroacetate (DCA) causes regression in several cancers, including lung, breast, and brain tumors.
Michelakis and his colleagues, including post-doctoral fellow Dr. Sebastien Bonnet, have published the results of their research in the journal Cancer Cell.
[Update 2011.05.12:
in Science: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/2/31/31ra34.abstract
Full text: https://www.burtongoldberg.com/home/burtongoldberg/DCA%20and%20Glioblastoma%20May%20%202010.pdf ].
Scientists and doctors have used DCA for decades to treat children with inborn errors of metabolism due to mitochondrial diseases. Mitochondria, the energy producing units in cells, have been connected with cancer since the 1930s, when researchers first noticed that these organelles dysfunction when cancer is present.
Until recently, researchers believed that cancer-affected mitochondria are permanently damaged and that this damage is the result, not the cause, of the cancer. But Michelakis, a cardiologist, questioned this belief and began testing DCA, which activates a critical mitochondrial enzyme, as a way to “revive” cancer-affected mitochondria.
The results astounded him.
Michelakis and his colleagues found that DCA normalized the mitochondrial function in many cancers, showing that their function was actively suppressed by the cancer but was not permanently damaged by it.
More importantly, they found that the normalization of mitochondrial function resulted in a significant decrease in tumor growth both in test tubes and in animal models. Also, they noted that DCA, unlike most currently used chemotherapies, did not have any effects on normal, non-cancerous tissues.
“I think DCA can be selective for cancer because it attacks a fundamental process in cancer development that is unique to cancer cells,” Michelakis said. “One of the really exciting things about this compound is that it might be able to treat many different forms of cancer”.
Another encouraging thing about DCA is that, being so small, it is easily absorbed in the body, and, after oral intake, it can reach areas in the body that other drugs cannot, making it possible to treat brain cancers, for example.
Also, because DCA has been used in both healthy people and sick patients with mitochondrial diseases, researchers already know that it is a relatively non-toxic molecule that can be immediately tested patients with cancer.” http://www.dca.med.ualberta.ca/
FAQ: http://www.dca.med.ualberta.ca/Home/FAQS/
Science: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/2/31/31ra34.abstract Full text: https://www.burtongoldberg.com/home/burtongoldberg/DCA%20and%20Glioblastoma%20May%20%202010.pdf
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All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective — and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives — as long as they’re not too numerous or too effective. Thus, as a species evolves cooperative behavior, it also evolves a dishonest minority that takes advantage of the honest majority. If individuals within a species have the ability to switch strategies, the dishonest minority will never be reduced to zero. As a result, the species simultaneously evolves two things: 1) security systems to protect itself from this dishonest minority, and 2) deception systems to successfully be parasitic.
Humans evolved along this path. The basic mechanism can be modeled simply. It is in our collective group interest for everyone to cooperate. It is in any given individual’s short-term self interest not to cooperate: to defect, in game theory terms. But if everyone defects, society falls apart. To ensure widespread cooperation and minimal defection, we collectively implement a variety of societal security systems.
Two of these systems evolved in prehistory: morals and reputation. Two others evolved as our social groups became larger and more formal: laws and technical security systems. What these security systems do, effectively, is give individuals incentives to act in the group interest. But none of these systems, with the possible exception of some fanciful science-fiction technologies, can ever bring that dishonest minority down to zero.
In complex modern societies, many complications intrude on this simple model of societal security. Decisions to cooperate or defect are often made by groups of people — governments, corporations, and so on — and there are important differences because of dynamics inside and outside the groups. Much of our societal security is delegated — to the police, for example — and becomes institutionalized; the dynamics of this are also important. Power struggles over who controls the mechanisms of societal security are inherent: “group interest” rapidly devolves to “the king’s interest.” Societal security can become a tool for those in power to remain in power, with the definition of “honest majority” being simply the people who follows the rules.
The term “dishonest minority” is not a moral judgment; it simply describes the minority who does not follow societal norm. Since many societal norms are in fact immoral, sometimes the dishonest minority serves as a catalyst for social change. Societies without a reservoir of people who don’t follow the rules lack an important mechanism for societal evolution. Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/05/status_report_t.html
Cf. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/02/societal_securi.html
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Kurzweil: 3 Supplements To Let You Live Until The Singularity; video 1′
(coenzyme Q10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coenzyme_Q10 , phosphatidylcholine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphatidylcholine , and vitamin D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D )
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How to build a religion: “FANCY founding a religion? Keen to reform a flagging faith? Here a few tips on how to attract and retain followers, thus ensuring that your gospel spreads far and wide, affording spiritual solace to as many souls as possible.
At the outset, you must realise that success is unlikely if you go wholly against the grain of human nature. Granted, religion is all about forging the perfect man, or at least ensuring that, as far as possible, he lives up to divine expectations. But preternatural power has forged man in such a way that he will swallow some of your ideas about how to achieve this more easily than others. [...]” http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/04/science_and_faiths
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[...] To track the risk of a new financial crisis, focus on whether the troubled euro zone economies are seeing bank runs and capital flight. Then comes a fundamental question about human nature, namely: Why do we so often postpone admitting that short-run patches simply aren’t going to work?
Tyler Cowen -
mazsa
A new study on Israeli judges shows that, when making parole decisions, they grant about 65% after meal breaks, and almost all the way down to 0% right before breaks and at the end of the day (i.e. as far from the last break as possible). There’s a relatively linear decline between the two points.
http://lsolum.typepad.com/files/danziger-levav-avnaim-pnas-2011.pdf
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Breakthrough to bridge the gap between man and machine: a research team has developed a technique for mapping both the connections and functions of nerve cells in the brain https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1104/11041102
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The Purple Healthcare Plan
We, the undersigned economists, support the following principles governing fundamental healthcare reform and endorse immediate implementation of the Purple Healthcare Plan.
Principles of Healthcare Reform
1. All Americans need a basic health plan and should be free to purchase supplemental health insurance coverage.
2. Healthcare should be privately provided with people free to choose their doctors and hospitals.
3. All who can pay for their health plans should do so through a combination of existing tax payments and health plan co-payments.
4. The government’s projected healthcare costs must be strictly capped and affordable on a long-term basis.
5. Health plans should be affordable regardless of one’s pre-existing health conditions or risk.
6. The system must provide strong incentives to prevent overuse of healthcare services and discourage bad healthcare behavior.
7. Medical malpractice reform is needed to keep providers from engaging in unaffordable defensive medicine.The Standard Plan
1. All Americans receive a voucher each year to purchase a standard plan from the private-plan provider of their choice.
2. Vouchers are individually risk-adjusted; those with higher expected healthcare costs, based on documented medical conditions, receive larger vouchers.
3. Participating insurance companies providing standard plans cannot deny coverage.
4. Each year a panel of doctors sets the coverages of the standard plan subject to a strict budget, namely that the total cost to the government of the vouchers cannot exceed 10 percent of GDP.
5. Insurance companies providing standard plans contract with private providers to cover their plan participants.
6. Americans choose doctors and hospitals included in the standard plan they choose.
7. Plan providers compete and provide incentives to improve participants’ health and limit bad health practices.
8. Plan providers offer supplemental plans to their participants and cannot deny supplemental insurance coverage to their participants.
9. The government (federal and state) ends the tax exclusion of employer-provided health insurance premiums.
10. Like all other Americans, Medicare, Medicaid, and health exchange participants are covered by the Purple Health Plan subject to appropriate transition provisions.
11. The roughly 10 percent of GDP now spent or allocated by federal and state government on these and related programs, as well as on the tax exclusion of employer-provided health insurance premiums, is reallocated to help finance the vouchers. -
mazsa
The Continuing Saga of the Gene Patenting Case
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What You Can’t Say: “Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It’s the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They’re just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they’re much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. [...]” http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
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I certainly wont suck dick for fame.
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I am not suggesting that the focus on children as a means to adulthood is inherently bad; indeed it’s absolutely necessary to prepare them for what is to come, and to guide them in the process of learning. We could even say that to neglect this would be immoral. Yet, I still wonder: is there a feature of childhood that ought not simply be a means to an end? Is there something of moral value that we ought not reduce to an investment into the future, whether theirs or ours?
Regan Penaluna -
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Seven Laws of Noah: “This code is a set of moral imperatives that, according to the Talmud, were given by God as a binding set of laws for the “children of Noah” – that is, all of humankind. According to Judaism, any non-Jew who lives according to these laws is regarded as a Righteous Gentile, and is assured of a place in the world to come (Olam Haba), the final reward of the righteous.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
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OS sw designed to minimize synthetic biology risks http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-03/vt-osd032111.php
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Bill Zeller – A suicide note from a PhD student who passed earlier this year “I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I
assume I’ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right
decision. Maybe it’s true that anyone who does this is insane by
definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not
writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up
loose ends and don’t want people to wonder why I did this. Since I’ve
never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely
draw the wrong conclusions.My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has
affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I
can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified
and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. [...]” http://pastebin.com/ge77Lxr8http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/01/07/27306/
http://1000memories.com/billzeller
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Scientists find a key to maintaining our DNA – Provides new clues in quest to slow aging: “[...] I could see having some sort of therapeutic that helps us live longer and healthier lives in 25 years. [...]” http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-03/uorm-sfa031811.php
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The brain has 3 layers of working memory: “[...] In a paper in the March issue of the Journal of Cognitive Psychology, researchers found that short-term memory is made up of three areas: a core focusing on one active item, a surrounding area holding at least three more active items, and a wider region containing passive items that have been tagged for later retrieval or “put on the back burner.” But more importantly, they found that the core region, called the focus of attention, has three roles — not two as proposed by previous researchers. First, this core focus directs attention to the correct item, which is affected by predictability of input pattern. Then it retrieves the item and subsequently, when needed, updates it. [...]” http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-03/ru-nsp030911.php
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/302781498-9429375/content~db=all~content=a933515287~frm=titlelink
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“In the very near future you may be forced to go through a “professional” to get access to your genetic information. [...]” http://www.gnxp.com/wp/2011/03/09/your-genes-your-rights-fdas-jeffrey-shuren-not-a-fan/
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CIA on cognitive biases & tools of thinking: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/index.html
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“For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.
When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. [...]” http://www.inspirationandchai.com/Regrets-of-the-Dying.html
Vs.
“For ten years my wife has been a hospice social worker, supporting ten dying patients a week. And she can’t recall any of those 5000 patients ever spontaneously expressing a general life regret. She usually gives open-ended questions like “tell us about your life” and sometimes dying folk express apologies to particular people, or regret that a surprise early death prevents particular plans like visiting Europe. Sometimes patients say what they are proud of about their lives, or how they’d like to be remembered. But they just never give general regrets about their lives. [...]
Deathbed folks are usually far from their analytical peak – they are often in great pain, and rather muddle-headed. So why would we think their comments especially insightful? I suspect we attach unrealistic significance to deathbed words because we are terrified to think about death, and eager to show our devotion to the dead and dying.
But if deathbed regrets are less than reliable descriptions of reality, where might they come from? One theory is that they are like the famous interview question “What is your main fault?”, which evoke answers like “I work too hard” or “I’m too much of a perfectionist.” These are obviously attempts to brag about a good feature, but call it a “fault.” All but regret #4 above fit this directly – they basically say “I sacrificed so much for you people.” Regret #4 similarly declares how much the dying cares about others.
Another theory is that deathbed regrets arise from taking a far view of our lives. The far mental mode is more happy, social, and idealistic, and the above regrets express a commitment to the ideals of happiness, friend and family, and resistance to conformity pressures.
It may be good to take stock of your life and consider your basic priorities. And you might do well to listen to spontaneous comments by those experienced in life on the mistakes they’ve made. But what pain-pinned muddle-headed dying folks say when pushed to express regrets seems unlikely to be especially informative.” http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/deathbed-regret-is-far.html
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‘Impact: Earth!’ simulator shows effects of asteroid hit
http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth
http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/general/2010/101103MeloshImpactEarth.html
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U.S. Says Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patents: “Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/business/30drug.html
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“The Dodecad ancestry project has two goals: 1) To provide detailed ancestry analysis to individuals who have tested with 23andMe; other testing companies may be included in the future. 2) To build samples of individuals for regions of the world (e.g. Greeks, Finns, Albanians, Southern Italians, etc.) currently under-represented in publicly available datasets. [...]
Who is eligible to participate
Due to my inability to process a large number of samples, at present, only the following groups are eligible to participate in the project’s current pilot phase:
Greeks (not necessarily from Greece: Cypriots, Pontic Greeks from the former USSR, North Epirotes, Griko speakers from Italy, Muslim rumca speakers from Turkey, etc. are all accepted)
People from the Balkans
People from Anatolia
People from the Caucasus
Italians
Non-Indo-European speakers from Europe (e.g., Finns, Hungarians, Basques)
Scandinavians and Icelanders
Iranians
Armenians
Jews from Italy, the Balkans, or Anatolia
Assyrians
Arabs
Samples should be received by the end of October 2010.What you will receive: [...]” http://dodecad.blogspot.com/2010/10/introducing-dodecad-ancestry-project.html
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The Cult of Multiculturalism: “Somebody eventually had to say it — and German chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for being the one who had the courage to say it out loud. Multiculturalism has “utterly failed.” [...]
“We kidded ourselves for a while,” Chancellor Merkel said, but now it was clear that the attempt to build a society where people of very different languages and cultures could “live side by side” and “enjoy each other” has “failed, utterly failed.” [...]
The absorption of millions of immigrants from Europe into American society may be cited as an example of the success of multiculturalism. But, in fact, they were absorbed in ways that were the direct opposite of what the multicultural cult is recommending today. [...]
It was in later generations, after the children and grandchildren of the immigrants to America were speaking English and living lives more like the lives of other Americans, that they spread out to live and work where other Americans lived and worked. This wasn’t multiculturalism. It was common sense.” http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/250190/cult-multiculturalism-thomas-sowellCf. The Evolution of Ethnocentrism “CONCLUSIONS
Our results show that in-group favoritism can be an undemanding yet powerful mechanism for supporting high levels of individually costly cooperation with only minimal cognitive requirements and in the absence of other, more complex mechanisms. This finding helps to explain how the observed predisposition toward in-group favoritism might have evolved and why such a predisposition might be easily triggered in situations where other social mechanisms for cooperation (institutions, reciprocity, etc.) are absent. Such a mechanism may have been derived from kin recognition systems or may have arisen separately. The model presented here does not study the process by which specific traits become salient in defining group distinctions, although the emergence of a predisposition to favor in-groups helps to explain why manipulating such differences is often a powerful political strategy (as demonstrated in the early 1990s by Slobodan Milosevic). We assume here that distinctions between groups are based on a single abstract trait, with only four available types. Future work might take account of the fact that group distinctions are socially constructed. Indeed, broadening the boundaries of what is perceived as the in-group represents one important policy approach to reducing ethnocentric behaviors. Our results also suggest several other policy implications worth further study. We have demonstrated that ethnocentrism can be an effective mechanism for supporting cooperation in the absence of such conditions as continuing interactions, well-developed institutions, and strong social norms. These conditions do often exist in society and may help to lower reliance on in-group favoritism to generate cooperation. Similarly, we show that the ability to discriminate based on group membership is especially helpful to cooperation in our model in more austere environments (e.g., when the individual cost of cooperation is high). Reducing the costs of cooperation (or increasing its benefits) might therefore reduce the value added of discriminatory behaviors. Finally, our model speaks to Putnam’s (2000) concepts of “bonding” and “bridging” capital, by demonstrating how easily ethnocentrism cre- ates “bonding” social capital within groups. Efforts to reduce discrimination might focus on how to create opportunities for creating “bridging” social capital between groups as well.” http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/Hammond-Ax_Ethno.pdf -
mazsa
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science ” Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong, So why are doctors – to a striking extent – still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice?” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269
Cf.: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:Ioannidis+author:J
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Judge Orders Injunction on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’: “A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday stopping enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, ending the military’s 17-year-old ban on openly gay troops.
U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’ landmark ruling was widely cheered by gay rights organizations [...]” https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/10/12/us/AP-US-Gays-in-Military.html
Source: http://ap.org/
Cf.
“Gay people are not sexually interested in straights.
The subtext to a lot of homophobic thinking is the idea that gays will try to get straight people into bed at the first opportunity, or that gays are looking to “convert” straights. Freud called this concept schwanzangst; the U.S. Army calls it Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.We combed through over 4 million match searches, and found virtually no evidence of it:
Match Search Returns
only 0.6% of gay men have ever searched for straight matches.
only 0.1% of lesbians have ever searched for straight matches.
only 0.13% of straight people’s profile visitors are gay.Furthermore
In our dataset, there was not a single gay user, male or female, who primarily searched for straight people.”
admin is discussing. 
Detecting bias http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/detecting-bias/