Depends on the industry/company but for me it works like this: when the holiday is on a Friday (my day off) it's bad luck and I don't get an extra day. Simultaneously though, when I have to go to a specific conference on a Friday I can switch my day off to a different day in that week since then I will be "forced" to work on my day off.
There is no way for us to know if the drug is a "revulotionary cancer drug" if we don't test it in a double blinded randomized controlled trial (RCT). Indeed it would be disappointing the later find out you were treated with the placebo, but so many drugs or other interventions have to potential to be revolutionary but fail to really change the clinical decision making later on.
I guess I never understood placebo trials in a lot of medical situations. Like what we are discussing here, a "revolutionary cancer drug", why even bother letting people die giving them placebos? Its cancer. Its not like you can placebo effect the cancer away. You don't need a double blind trial to see if the drug stops the cancer, you just give people the drug and observe the cancer! I feel like our medical system is pretty wack. Or maybe I'm entirely wrong and you can placebo cancer away.
That is not how randomised controlled trials in conditions like cancer work. They are almost always a riff on new drug + current best treatment regime vs current best regime. Sometimes a drug within a regime is swapped with the new agent and the two compared in terms of survival and toxicity.
Progress in cancer treatment is almost always achieved by incremental tweaking of how we treat it. There are a few revolutionary agents based on specific disease mechanisms in certain cancers (e.g. imatinib [1]) but these are in the minority - cancer is protean.
A cold takes 7 days to resolve on its own. With modern medicine, it will take merely a week !
The placebo is not to eliminate the cancer, it’s to guarantee that we know the “normal” path without the drug, and gives a comparison point between the control and the target. The fundamental problem is that cancer can just resolve/improve on its own, or rather without intervention… so just poking and watching isn’t sufficient proof of the drug’s efficacy
Yet it's so hard to have a good intuition about that. We're wired to think in terms of action and agency and be morally judged on its basis. This is deeply rooted in human psychology and acts as a foundation for many of our behaviours, from religion to vaccine hesitancy.
Ask anybody I'd they think it's more likely that a disease just went away on its own or if there was some reason, "something".
Most people will tell it's more likely something happened, a miracle of some kind for some reasons. Deep down there is always a reason for things to happen, but "your cells in your body did a good job" just doesn't sound right.
Even when people accept the idea that the body can fix itself pretty well, they tend to swing the pendulum too much and assume the body can do just anything .... provided you do (agency) the right motions (potions, talismans, right diet, right prayers...)
Excellent point. One thing I notice in the discussion about AZ is the fact that the risk for thrombosis is not really put into context. One very strong comparison is this: when taking a 6-hour flight the risk for thrombosis is about 5 times higher than the risk currently associated with the AZ-vaccination (ref. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17351849/). Still most of us will happily board a plane once this is possible again. I'm not saying we shouldn't be critical about side-effects associated with the AZ-vaccine, I'm just missing a bit of context.
I think the appeal to the tidyverse "universe" is the readability of the code. Especially to novel users of R (and there are a lot of people in science that have to generate a plot once a month or so). ggplot2 works fine if you only use that package without the rest of tidyverse. I personally use the data.table package a lot and than generate plots using ggplot2. Stackoverflow is indeed very much focused on tidyverse packages which is a pity as indeed base R can solve so many problems posted too without the need of additional packages.
Perhaps aimed at a lower age group, but I think https://www.e-learningforkids.org/ should also be mentioned. They provide free primary school education for all kids. Currently mostly focused on math though.
Is there any validation that the user is actually from the selected college? It seems I can write a review about a random dorm just by selecting it. What about using the student’s .edu email address to validate the submission? Just a validation code in the email should be enough. Good luck on the launch though!
"My hunch is that Google has a oncology/immunology platform"
As an MD, soon to have a PhD in oncology immunology, I always wonder what project Google could be working on in this area. After all they are a company and most probably try to develop products that will yield a return in the future. So why would someone chose to work for a Google firm that has no real track record in the Life Sciences versus the many life-science companies that already have amazing logistics/experience in place (Novartis, Biogen, Takeda to name just a few in Cambridge, MA). Outside "data-science" projects like genomics, or very technical project like lab-on-a-chip devices, I wouldn't see a big advantage moving to the bay area. However, I guess offering huge salaries always helps convincing people to join your company. And the winters in the Mountain View are probably warmer than the Boston area.
If I have to guess, I don't think Google plan to build a HTS facility for drugs R&D or a huge lab foot-print to do wet-lab work. They probably want to leverage their existing compute/engineering infrastructure to get involved in the next phase of informatics needs in health care and life science (e.g., cloud storage and compute needs for clinical genome sequencing, analysis workflows like 23andMe for academia/industry/clinical).
Keep in mind that Google is hiring some of these people to their Cambridge office. I was just there (interning) over the summer, and a PHD intern was working on a project in this area
Finally a topic on hackernews that I am getting my PhD in..! Anyway, do you have any data indicating what percentage of circRNA is "free" in the plasma versus inside of other entities like platelets or extracellular vesicles (exosomes)?
The work with these molecules is early enough, that to my knowledge, there are no studies of this type that are published. And, in fact one could pose the same question for linear mRNA and ncRNA in exosomes (or ESVs). Most of the studies are on miRNA in ESVs, however we have done considerably work internally on characterizing long- mRNA and ncRNA in exosomes. These vesicles are fascinating!
A private pilot license (PPL) does not allow for commercial flying (charging passengers). To charge passengers to pilot requires a commercial pilot license.
A PPL does allow for "cost sharing" for flights under Part 91.
It's a very grey area around ride-sharing boards, but as a pilot I wouldn't touch a ride-sharing board because of exactly what you say, that the FAA would likely look at that as a Part 135 (charter) operation, my insurance may not be valid, my certificate would be at risk, etc. all for a few hundred bucks in shared costs. No thanks.
It's perfectly legal for me to fly 3 buddies down to Atlantic City and have each of us pay 25% of the direct cost for the flight. Let's say that was $100pp. Perfectly legal by FAR 61.113(c). http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&rgn=div8&view=te...
IMO, it's not OK for me to post on a ride board: "Fly to AC this weekend with me. $100 per person."
It's a grey area, I admit, but I wouldn't touch it, and I would recommend against someone building a startup to do just that without qualified legal counsel first. (and if they say "it's ok!", I'm not sure they're qualified... ;) )
It's a very thorny area, and not one that I'd want to get involved in either. The FAA also has the concept of a "Common Purpose" to the flight. By my non-lawyer reading of this, it would be illegal for a private pilot to even have a casual conversation with someone, discover that they're going to the same city, and split the expenses. They have to be say, all going on the same vacation together. I believe that the intention of this is to avoid people flying with private pilots that they don't personally know and have the opportunity to evaluate their general judgment.
Yes, it's a good idea to be wary. As with most regulations, you'll get by with it as long as nothing goes wrong. The problem is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
A few years ago, I read about a case involving a friendly fellow (private pilot) who received a call from his neighbor in the night about a sick relative. The two were friends, so the pilot offered to take the neighbor by plane to save time. The neighbor asked if he could pay to help offset the expenses, and the pilot said that the only thing legal would be to share fuel expenses (split 50/50). At this point everything seemed fine. However, the neighbor wasn't accustomed to the high cost of fuel in aviation and decided to check if the cost was reasonably calculated. Since he didn't want to appear accusatory, he called someone he thought would know, and this happened to be the FAA.
The FAA saw this as him asking about the cost of the flight, involved themselves, and ruled that this flight did not meet the "Common Purpose" criteria, and it ultimately ended in an enforcement action.
Here is a link to an FAA letter on the subject of ride boards. Unfortunately, it doesn't bring a lot of concrete clarity, but it definitely makes it clear that there it would be easy to cross the line with these:
Well, these kind of problems have their own way of being solved. Look at uber.com - you would take your "buddy friend" you just get acquainted with over the Internet!
I would assume that the FAA is perceived to have a lot more power than a city's taxi licensing department. Especially given the amount of time that a pilot will have put into learning to fly, I doubt many would want to risk it.
Not only a CPL/ATPL but also an Air Operator's Certificate. Unfortunately it's not as easy as buying yourself a license, rent a plane and start making money.
