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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • JoBo@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzCommunity
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    2 months ago

    The fact of higher protein content appears to be true (without going back to find and critique all the original studies). Explanations are much harder to ‘prove’ for questions like this.

    We can’t do experiments on the evolution of tears, so all we can do is come up with plausible theories and look at how they fit with the body of evidence. With enough evidence, from enough different angles, we might one day be able to say which proposed explanations fit the facts (and which don’t). It’s how we (eventually) proved smoking was killing people (another question we cannot do experiments on human beings to prove one way or the other) but not all questions are as important as smoking was and there isn’t necessarily a neat, single factor explanation to find even if someone was willing to fund all the necessary research.

    Not my area but, for example, I recently saw a study claim that sniffing women’s tears makes men less aggressive. That’s an angle that might help build some support for, or knock down, the theory that emotional tears are useful for social communication (ie help get women killed slightly less often). Did those studies use sad stories or onions? Did any study compare sad stories to onions? If we’re seeing hints of differences between sad stories and onions, that would tend to support the social communication element of the explanation. Unless we think there’s a difference between sad tears and frightened tears, which there probably is, so we should check that too. And the rest of the literature on tears, if it’s considered important enough to get the theory right. And we need to remember that sticky tears are not the same thing as smelly tears, so can we do experiments where non-emotional tears are made sticky, and non-sticky tears made to smell frightened?

    Etc etc.

    Explaining things we observe but cannot directly experiment on is a process, a process which typically takes many years and dozens of research groups. And a lot of funding. And decades of exhausting battles, if there is a lot riding on the answer (as it did with Big Tobacco vs Public Health).



  • Obviously, people want that (the actual question asked was about an “urgent” need to see a doctor).

    But this proposal is just a repeat of one of Blair’s worst policy failures, without acknowledging how or why it failed.

    When New Labour introduced the 48 hour target to see a GP, the vast majority of GPs ‘met’ the target by closing down their phonelines as soon as they ran out of appointments. In the process, they turned the 48 hour target into a 24 hour target because otherwise they’d only have been able to open the phoneline every other day.

    It was very bad back then. It’s much worse now because the NHS was at least relatively well-funded under Blair.

    Not that they’re announcing this because they think the policy will work, obv. Just doing their best to make sure the voters blame everyone but them.

    [The link is to a video of an election Question Time audience haranguing Blair about the foolishness of this target.]


  • The why is a much harder question.

    You’re right about it probably being true, this is not the first study to find something similar, there’s two others reported on here: Patients have better outcomes with female surgeons, studies find

    It’s interesting that this study looked at the proportion of women on the surgical team (not the composition of the surgical team for any specific operation):

    Overall, female surgeons performed 47,874 (6.7%) of the operations. Female anaesthesiologists treated patients in 192,144 (27%) of operations.

    Hospitals with teams comprising more than 35% female surgeons and anaesthesiologists had better postoperative outcomes, the study found. Operations in such hospitals were associated with a 3% reduction in the odds of 90-day postoperative major morbidity in patients.

    There’s some speculation in that first link about differences in aggression and risk-taking. But, given the relative rarity of female surgeons, it could just be a competency effect. If women are a small minority for reasons not related to competency, and 93.3% of surgeons are men, it suggests that almost half the men are in the job because a more competent women didn’t get it. Groups with more women do better simply because they didn’t discount half the talent pool quite so heavily.




  • National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles - but that means one in 10 are not spotted.

    At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since they were introduced in 2010. In the past five years, seven coroners have called for them to be made safer.

    National Highways’ latest figures suggest that if you break down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder.

    No brainer. But then they quote this prick without directly challenging the contradiction:

    The agency’s operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to “close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show”.

    The ‘gap’ seems to be a result of drivers having a much more accurate perception than the people paid to defend them.

    National Highways says reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion and that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans to deal with power outages.

    Just add more lanes. That’ll work. It’s never worked but obviously it’ll work. Fuckwits.


  • All barristers are only as good as the evidence given to them

    That’s not entirely true. The Secret Barrister made a good point on the site I won’t visit to grab the link: people always ask how you can defend someone you know is guilty; they never ask how you can prosecute someone who you know is innocent.

    We have an adversarial system, not an inquisatorial one. Barristers are paid to present one case or the other, not decide what is true for themselves.

    There are barristers and judges who may well be sanctioned, professionally if not also criminally, for their part in this scandal. Richard Morgan is one that sticks in my mind. He relied on an entirely circular argument (Lee Castleton signed off the accounts therefore the reliability of Horizon is irrelevant, even though it produced the accounts that Castleton had to sign if he wanted to continue trading). If you read/watch his appearance at the inquiry, it appears to literally dawn on him during the questioning. He was professionally negligent and he should not be allowed to get away with it.


  • The CPS, and equivalents in Scotland, brought around a third of the wrongful prosecutions.

    The barristers the CPS employs to bring prosecutions are the same barristers used by the Post Office, using the same courts and the same judges.

    This scandal just shines a light on how impossible the criminal justice system is for ordinary people with more limited means. Bates vs PO only happened because they managed to find 555 claimants (500 being the minimum their funders needed to risk it).

    There was a case settled in 2003 because the court appointed a single independent expert to act for both sides and he pointed out all the holes in the Post Office case. That should have been the end of it. But they made the Cleveleys subpostmaster sign a confidentiality agreement, slandered the expert, and carried on prosecuting.

    I told Post Office the truth about Horizon in 2003, IT expert says


  • Batteries are too heavy for many applications (including, arguably, cars).

    That doesn’t make hydrogen the only solution but it is at least a currently available solution. I posted a link about why the Orkneys (population 23k) are producing hydrogen and switching much of their transport to it: they have so much wind the UK (population 70m) national grid can’t take all the power they generate from it.




  • That is true of all colours of hydrogen other than green (and possibly natural stores of ‘fossil’ hydrogen if they can be extracted without leakage).

    Green hydrogen is better thought of as a battery than a fuel. It’s a good way to store the excess from renewables and may be the only way to solve problems like air travel.

    How hydrogen is transforming these tiny Scottish islands

    That’s not to say it’s perfect. Hydrogen in the atmosphere slows down the decomposition of methane so leaks must be kept well below 5% or the climate benefits are lost. We don’t have a good way to measure leaks. It’s also quite inefficient because a lot of energy is needed to compress it for portable uses.

    And, of course, the biggest problem is that Big Carbon will never stop pushing for dirtier hydrogens to be included in the mix, if green hydrogen paves the way.


  • The data showed that the chance of scoring rose when teammates showed their support through touch. The effect only appeared after a failed first shot, which makes sense because such a scenario is likely to spike stress levels.

    Of course, the data is not shown. And the study is not able to draw causal conclusions. In this case, they’ve hunted around and found a subset of shots (second shots after a first failed shot) where it’s true. And it’s easy to make up reasons after the fact why that might make sense.

    It does seem very reasonable to hypothesise that supportive team mates make it less likely you choke on the second shot. But they haven’t shown this is down to touch (they just used that as a proxy for supportive team mates). Nor that the percentage of successful second shots after a failed first shot would be improved by more touching regardless of whether team mates are genuinely supportive or quietly seething…





  • She’s very similar to JK Rowling, even if Jordan Peterson is as far as she’s got in her adventures with the far right so far.

    You have an incorrect mental timeline on sports inclusion. Some sporting bodies have recently begun to introduce bans under pressure from conservative politicians desperate to distract the people they are pickpocketing. The stronger trend is for inclusion, because two years on gender-affirming hormones eliminates all the advantages a trans woman might have apart from extra height for those who went through a male puberty because they weren’t lucky enough to get puberty blockers early enough.

    Laurel Hubbard: First transgender athlete to compete at Olympics

    The 43-year-old became eligible to compete at the Olympics when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2015 changed its rules allowing transgender athletes to compete as a woman if their testosterone levels are below a certain threshold.

    (Feel free to look up Hubbard’s performances before and after transition.)

    One of the big tells with Lewis is her scare-mongering about trans women in women’s prisons. It has long been the case in the UK that women who are considered too violent to be housed in a women’s prison have been sent to men’s prisons. This applies to all women, cis and trans, and obviously includes trans women who have committed violent crimes against other women. People like Lewis seize on very rare instances where errors have been made to cause alarm and distress. Of course, they ignore the fates of trans women who have mistakenly been housed in men’s prisons without any of the protective segregation cis women in men’s prisons receive.

    Also it was weird of you to bring up her race in the original comment - her being a white woman is orthogonal to the criticism you are making of her.

    No idea why you think race and class are not relevant in a comment about her abuse of intersectionality. If you don’t understand, dictionaires exist.