US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3606

On April 14 2016 09:11 TheTenthDoc wrote:
Until "statistical significance" is no longer a requirement to get published, every single literature review of the effect of anything with a non-zero effect will be biased away from the null. It's just a mathematical fact. This is a bigger problem than anything involving "reproducibility" which is mostly an artifact of the stupidity of the modern application of the p value and hypothesis testing in settings of effect measurement, alongside a total lack of understanding of what the numbers people are creating in studies actually mean.

After assessing more than 1,800 studies on homeopathy, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council was only able to find 225 that were rigorous enough to analyze. And a systematic review of these studies revealed “no good quality evidence to support the claim that homeopathy is effective in treating health conditions.”

On April 14 2016 09:43 cLutZ wrote:


Its just stats in action. If you have 95% confidence intervals as a standard 5% will be wrong. But only interesting results will get published widely, so there is a bias for those in the 5% being more recognizable.

Also, I will say, even as an engineer I don't understand all the massaging that certain studies seem to engage in, and how legit or not it is. So I can see why peer review is inadequate.

The oil industry’s knowledge of dangerous climate change stretches back to the 1960s, with unearthed documents showing that it was warned of “serious worldwide environmental changes” more than 45 years ago.

The Stanford Research Institute presented a report to the American Petroleum Institute (API) in 1968 that warned the release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels could carry an array of harmful consequences for the planet.

The emergence of this stark advice follows a series of revelations that the fossil fuel industry was aware of climate change for decades, only to publicly deny its scientific basis.

“Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000 and these could bring about climatic change,” the 1968 Stanford report, found and republished by the Center for International Environmental Law, states. “If the Earth’s temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans and an increase in photosynthesis.

“It is clear that we are unsure as to what our long-lived pollutants are doing to our environment; however, there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.”

The study, written by scientists Elmer Robinson and RC Robbins, adds that accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere could cause “serious worldwide environmental changes”.

The scientists estimated that CO2 in the atmosphere could reach 400 parts per million by 2000. In fact, CO2 levels broke that milestone last year, recording their largest leap on record.

This huge increase in CO2, the primary driver of the greenhouse effect, has helped global temperatures rise by 1C over the past century. It is estimated that about three-quarters of the world’s known fossil fuel reserves, including oil, coal and gas, will have to remain unburned if civilisation is to avoid the worst ravages of climate change, such as droughts, floods, food insecurity and inundation from rising seas.

API, the peak body for the oil industry in the US, knew about the dangers of climate change at least 20 years before the issue was brought into mainstream public discourse via the former Nasa scientist James Hansen. Former US president Lyndon Johnson also received an early warning about climate change, with scientists explaining the mechanism of the greenhouse effect in 1965.

On April 14 2016 09:54 hunts wrote:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1800-studies-later-scientists-conclude-homeopathy-doesnt-work-180954534/?no-ist Just something I found.

On April 14 2016 10:09 SpiritoftheTunA wrote:

see i'm wondering why you're posting this at all, because i personally believe this is news to literally no one in this thread

anyone wish to contradict me?

do you honestly believe there's homeopathy believers in this thread?

Mike Lee isn’t backing down.

The Utah senator faces a perilous path to getting the No. 4 job in Republican Party leadership that he covets: Majority Leader Mitch McConnell argues that internal party rules dictate that Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming can serve in the job until 2018. And there’s substantial wariness within the caucus about an intraparty feud over future leadership elections, particularly while the GOP is pressing to hang on to its majority.

Lee’s gambit also could disrupt the unity within the party fostered by its stance against the president’s Supreme Court nomination — and further the senator’s reputation as a conservative bomb-thrower.

But Lee is pressing his case, insisting that the position of Republican Policy Committee chairman is wide open for 2017.
“I have no interest running against John Barrasso for this or anything else. I am interested in running for the open-seat Republican Policy chair,” Lee said in an interview on Wednesday.

That Lee believes the seat is still open is a direct challenge to McConnell, who brought Republican Secretary Laura Dove into the Tuesday caucus lunch to explain that Barrasso is eligible for another two-year term. But if Lee wins the argument, he’d imperil three-fifths of the leadership team: Barrasso, Republican Conference Chairman John Thune of South Dakota and Conference Vice Chairman Roy Blunt of Missouri all took their jobs in late 2011.

The crux of Lee’s latest challenge to the GOP’s status quo is that McConnell is wrong to say that GOP precedent allows those leaders to serve until 2018. McConnell and Dove argue that the trio’s partial term does not count toward a term limit of three, two-year terms, citing former Sen. Don Nickles’ time serving as party whip for more than six years from 1996 until 2003.

On April 14 2016 10:07 oneofthem wrote:
how heavy is experimental design and statistics in a bio program?

ive actually helped my dad edit some of his medical research papers it seems pretty heavy on the statistical and design aspects. this is in molecular cardiology

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who is no fan of the current Republican presidential frontrunners, said he was “at a loss” on Tuesday after House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) formally announced that he would not accept if the party nominated him.

“I'm at a loss, OK? I do not know what's going to happen,” the Arizona senator told Bloomberg Politics. “I just don't see that a lot of it's going to turn out well. Because there are too many divisions within our party.”

McCain spokeswoman Rachael Dean told TPM on Wednesday that his comments should not be read as a direct response to the Speaker's announcement.

“As Senator McCain has stated, he is not supporting or endorsing any candidate in the Republican primary at this point," Dean said in an emailed statement. "In this exchange, Senator McCain was not reacting to Speaker Ryan’s speech but to the 2016 presidential race in general.”

Ryan stuck a pin through the hopes of establishment Republicans on Capitol Hill when he unequivocally told the press during a last-minute news conference to “count me out” of consideration. Rumors that a white knight Ryan could ride into a contested GOP convention to rescue the party from two divisive leading candidates had been circulating for months.

On April 14 2016 10:23 TheTenthDoc wrote:


I can't speak for general bio majors, but my pharmacy program had a token biostatistics course where they tried to teach us stats, everyone hated it, and I'm now finding out while getting my Ph D that a lot of what they said about confidence intervals/p values was just not right because of how they had to dumb it down. I was taught that a 95% confidence interval from a study was the interval where if you repeated the study an infinite number of times the number would fall in that interval 95% of the time, for example, which is just not true.

I get the sense a lot of MD programs are the same way. Since MDs run the big medical journals and are nearly required to get funding for studies, it's kind of out of the "basic chemists/basic biologists" hands. I suspect a Ph D in biology or chemistry will usually get a much better grounding than an MD. It also probably really depends on your university.

Sadly the people writing guidelines are MDs with one or two statisticians thrown in the mix.

Edit: Note that MDs are by and large very smart, considerate, helpful people. But very smart, considerate, helpful people that were taught something incorrectly or in passing can be pretty big roadblocks.

On April 14 2016 06:54 ticklishmusic wrote:


I don't think its a reflection on her intelligence at all. She either forgot or doesn't care.

On April 14 2016 12:16 IgnE wrote:
I don't really understand what prompted the Ivanka love. My perduring image of her is her talking about her father in the movie Born Rich made by the Johnson & Johnson heir that was posted several pages back. I've watched that movie multiple times in the last decade. I love the Italian aristocrat guy.

On April 14 2016 10:07 oneofthem wrote:
how heavy is experimental design and statistics in a bio program?

ive actually helped my dad edit some of his medical research papers it seems pretty heavy on the statistical and design aspects. this is in molecular cardiology

she can vote or register however she wants,