In many cases, I'd agree with you. But in context of what happened here, the fact that the company was Chinese (or simply just foreign, for that matter) is absolutely relevant. A few outstanding points:
1. The company was "unaccustomed to the rigor of American construction rules" and "lacked basic quality control", leading Caltran to "relax U.S. standards when the firm couldn’t finish fast enough."
2. "ZPMC violated the job contract by delivering key documents in Chinese instead of English. ABF lacked sufficient quality-assurance staff to speak directly to its own subcontractor – also a contract violation."
3. "Counting the money spent on travel and living costs for Caltrans and its contractors, the suspension span consumed much more than the $250 million in ZPMC’s assumed efficiencies that made the Chinese steel so cost-effective." On living costs alone, Caltran "paid about $50,000 annually per person to rent more than a dozen well-appointed rooms."
Asked for justification, "Caltrans described the accommodations as "reasonable and appropriate" in a written statement. 'The hotel provided a government rate that was comparable to rates at other western hotels,' and followed bargaining agreements, based in part on providing adequate 'safety and support for employees far from home.'"
If you want to know how to do something, how something works, you'll use a different, non-google indexer for searching, say, all of the "how to" sites: e.g. wikipedia, stack exchange, about.com, etc.
I've gradually started to do this using DuckDuckGo's bangs [1]. It actually works pretty well if I know exactly which site I want to search. I do miss Google's ability to filter by time, though.
The FDA has more than likely directly prevented hundreds of millions deaths worldwide. It's literally one of very few safeguards you can rely on to know that you're not eating poison.
Amusingly, the top comment on a front page HN post [1] right now concerns one of the first court cases [2] that gave FDA some real power. Before this case, companies could sell a poison like emetic tartar and market it as a hangover drug. Selling stuff like this still happens today in countries without an FDA equivalent. [3] It even happens in countries with a drug regulatory body, but one that's weak. [4]
As with all regulation, there's a balance between benefit/risk. As you point out, there is a financial and time burden of regulation. But with warts and all, the work that the FDA has done and currently does far outweighs these burdens.
> The only good thing I can find to say about the bureaucrats at the FDA is that they respond to regional regulatory arbitrage - to medical tourism - by loosening their grip and letting things through. Or at least they do when said treatments are so widely available elsewhere in the world that the risk of looking bad by continuing to block them in the US is worse than the risk of looking bad because one of the outcomes of a normal, low error rate in medicine gets picked up by the press. Look at simple stem cell transplants, now available in the US these last couple of years, for a good example of this in practice.
I'm not quite sure how to respond to this rant. But I'll point out findings from a 2012 NEJM study comparing the FDA to the EU's EMA and Canada's Health Canada: [5]
"RESULTS: There were 510 applications for novel therapeutic agents approved from 2001 through 2010 — 225 by the FDA, 186 by the EMA, and 99 by Health Canada; among the applications, there were 289 unique agents. The median length of time for completion of the first review was 303 days (interquartile range, 185 to 372) for applications approved by the FDA, 366 days (interquartile range, 310 to 445) for those approved by the EMA, and 352 days (interquartile range, 255 to 420) for those approved by Health Canada (P<0.001 for the comparison across the three agencies). The median total review time was also shorter at the FDA than at the EMA or Health Canada (P=0.002). Among the 289 unique novel therapeutic agents, 190 were approved in both the United States and Europe (either by the EMA or through the mutual recognition process), of which 121 (63.7%) were first approved in the United States; similarly, 154 were approved in both the United States and Canada, of which 132 (85.7%) were first approved in the United States."
Thanks for the response; I'm definitely applying to the Data Engineers program. My engineering background has been more on-the-job than from formal coursework, so I was a bit subdued by list of engineering disciplines in the "Accepting Applicants From" section (though I now see "Scientific Research" as one of the fields, yay!). I really hope I can participate.
I'm seriously thinking about applying (actually to the Data Science program). I'm currently looking to start in the SF Bay Area as a data scientist (or data analyst, if need be) in late May to June.
But I have a question -- I've only advanced to the masters level at this point; I recently graduated with an MS in biostatistics. "PhD" and "postdoc" is written all over the site. Should I even consider applying?
Finally -- what's the best way to contact you? Should I email the email address under "Contact"? Or is there a preferred alternative?
I agree with your general sentiment. However, it only takes one member of the underrepresented group (with endorsing capability), or any member of a centrist or neutral party, to approve the a comment. (And as of so far, it doesn't seem like pending comments can be disapproved, e.g. by a hostile party.)
Granted, it's true that by nature of being underrepresented, the probability of that one member showing up to approve the comment may be unacceptably low. But I doubt it. In other words, to use your example, as long as the probability is high enough that at least one woman will show up to approve another woman's comment, there shouldn't be a problem.
Personally, I think that this probability is pretty high, though, as pg mentions, this'll have to be determined empirically. For example, it's entirely possible (as discussed in previous threads), that the population of active endorsers are skewed toward certain groups. Or that even a slightly <100% probability of legit comments being seen can ultimately compound systemic biases in the long run.
I'm on an academic network, so I'm not sure if the PDF's paywalled...
From a cursory glance at the paper, this is what they had to say about how they kept the mice awake:
Mice were housed in a light/dark environment with lights on from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. ... A previously validated, enriched, novel environment (Gompf et al., 2010) was used to promote spontaneous exploratory wakefulness. The short-term wakefulness (Sh Wake) period selected was 3 h during the lights-on period. With zeitgeber time 0 h (ZT0) referenced to the onset of the lights-on period, Sh Wake occurred at ZT8–ZT11, while extended sleep loss (Ext Wake) consisted
of 8 h of continuous wake time at ZT3–ZT11 with 16 h intervals in the home cages after the first and second days of 8 h wake time.
When I saw "6x4", my immediate thought was a "six by four" matrix. So, by convention, this means 6 rows and 4 columns, corresponding to e.g. 6 observations of 4 variables each (from a statistician's perspective). The closest answer I could find here was "six lots of four."
As a statistician, I guess I should be happy that more people are aware of this. But I also think too many people are taking "correlation != causation" superficially. I mean, almost all of science is based on significant correlational findings, especially when the traditional way to prove causation (i.e. via randomized trial) is unethical (i.e. we can't randomly assign people to be insured vs. uninsured).
Along these lines, I often find people who say "correlation != causation" don't stop and wonder "so how _can_ we prove causation (in a non-randomized study)?" I guess many of them can be partially excused since the answer is non-trivial. But generally, here's a few rules of thumb for making a stronger case for causality from correlation:
* the effect size is relatively large (e.g. uninsured children die at 60% higher odds than insured children)
* the cause comes before the effect (e.g. people are uninsured before they go to the hospital and/or die)
* reversible association (e.g. risk of dying at a hospital changes when people get insurance)
* consistency / consensus across multiple studies (e.g. many studies showing that a difference in insurance status is associated with a significant difference in hospital mortality )
* dose-response relationship (e.g. I didn't link examples previously -- but there were a few studies showing that different levels of insurance, from none to Medicaid to private, is associated with different rates of hospital mortality)
* plausibility (e.g. even from a qualitative point of view, it's quite believable that people who unable to pay a hospital bill might get worse service)
> Hospitals don't let uninsured people die and insuring people doesn't magically save their lives.
Not sure where you're getting this. A quick Google Scholar or PubMed search shows a consensus that mortality rate is significantly higher for uninsured than for insured. [1, 2, 3]
[1] e.g. http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/2/236.short -- On multivariate analysis, uninsured compared with insured patients had an increased mortality risk (odds ratio: 1.60, 95% CI: 1.45–1.76). The excess mortality in uninsured children in the US was 37.8%, or 16 787, of the 38 649 deaths over the 18 period of the study. Children who were hospitalized without insurance have significantly increased all-cause in-hospital mortality as compared with children who present with insurance.
[2] e.g. http://journals.lww.com/jtrauma/Abstract/2012/11000/Undiagno... -- Undiagnosed preexisting comorbidities play a crucial role in determining outcomes following trauma. Diagnosis of medical comorbidities may be a marker of access to health care and may be associated with treatment, which may explain the gap in mortality rates between insured and uninsured trauma patients.
[3] e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000296101... -- A total of 1,203,243 patients were analyzed, with a mortality rate of 3.7%. The death rate was significantly higher in penetrating trauma patients versus blunt trauma patients (7.9% vs 3.0%; P < .001), and higher in the uninsured (5.3% vs 3.2%; P < .001). On multivariate analysis, uninsured patients had an increased odds of death than insured patients, in both penetrating and blunt trauma patients.
Contrary to the current HN title, the article points out:
Evidence presented during Private Manning’s court-martial for his role as the source for large archives of military and diplomatic files given to WikiLeaks revealed that he had used a program called “wget” to download the batches of files. That program automates the retrieval of large numbers of files, but it is considered less powerful than the tool Mr. Snowden used.
>Something else I just thought of while typing this is that this would make an awesomely sci-fi means of information storage. No need to remember a password, we've encoded your gut flora with your private key!
First occurred to me as interesting too. Then I realized that you'd be dropping your private key in every toilet you defecate into. Not to say that secure intra-body information storage isn't possible though.
Then again, re: the steganography -- gut flora's pretty diverse (and there's a lot of it). People might not necessarily think to, or want to, dig through your shit.
From the article: "These findings, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in September, echo previous work that showed milk composition varying with infant gender in gray seals and red deer and with infant gender and the mother's condition in rhesus macaques."
As the article rightly notes: "...every one of your relatives who spits in a 23andMe vial is giving the company a not-inconsiderable bit of your own genetic information to the company along with their own. If you have several close relatives who are already in 23andMe’s database, the company already essentially has all that it needs to know about you."
According to the report, [tenure and tenure-track] positions now make up only 24 percent of the academic work force, with the bulk of the teaching load shifted to adjuncts, part-timers, graduate students and full-time professors not on the tenure track.
The report was published by Center for the Future of Higher Education in 2012. Link: [2]
From the executive summary from this 2010 publication by the American Federation of Teachers [3]:
Altogether, part-time/adjunct faculty members account for 47 percent of all faculty, not including graduate employees. The percentage is even higher in community colleges, with part-time/adjunct faculty representing nearly 70 percent of the instructional workforce in those institutions.
1. The company was "unaccustomed to the rigor of American construction rules" and "lacked basic quality control", leading Caltran to "relax U.S. standards when the firm couldn’t finish fast enough."
2. "ZPMC violated the job contract by delivering key documents in Chinese instead of English. ABF lacked sufficient quality-assurance staff to speak directly to its own subcontractor – also a contract violation."
3. "Counting the money spent on travel and living costs for Caltrans and its contractors, the suspension span consumed much more than the $250 million in ZPMC’s assumed efficiencies that made the Chinese steel so cost-effective." On living costs alone, Caltran "paid about $50,000 annually per person to rent more than a dozen well-appointed rooms."
Asked for justification, "Caltrans described the accommodations as "reasonable and appropriate" in a written statement. 'The hotel provided a government rate that was comparable to rates at other western hotels,' and followed bargaining agreements, based in part on providing adequate 'safety and support for employees far from home.'"