Posts by Bart Janssen
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
the suspension of payments to the super fund
note these have now been extended another two years to 2018
Nice of them to choose to not save for our retirement.
-
ponies :(
i was expecting ponies.Ghostcrawler already gave you a pony*
*note truly random geek link you have been warned.
-
you’d only do it if you were deliberately trying to mislead
OMG politician tries to mislead public! Pictures at 10.
-
Not only can we not know whether it’s real or not now, but we won’t know whether it’s real or not in 2013/14.
So if they're right fine and dandy and if they're wrong we're F'd.
So is it OK with them if we withhold their salaries until 2014 and if they're right they get paid? You know like performance based pay.
-
I found them in an old sock.
You found a sock!?!?!
-
I've been somewhat fascinated with improvements in my fitness via cycling
Which is why some folks become sports physiologists. The way the body adapts to exercise really is fascinating. I really loved the bit of biochemistry when I learnt why you stop being hungry after a while.
Also being able to see your toes again is kinda fun too.
-
due consideration of environmental factors
I can explain why there really is only limited study of environmental factors in health, particularly human health.
There are a couple of major problems.
The biggest is that genotype dramatically affects the response to environment. So it becomes really hard to identify an environmental effect when only 1% of the population respond that way. The other 99% of the people obscure the effect.Then you have the combinatorial problem which escalates as soon as you get any synergy between compounds. If genotype A responds to compound 1 only the the presence of compound 7 then my head explodes.
Science works most efficiently when you can limit variables but in the real world variables often cannot be limited.
Statistical analysis (epidemiology) can help but its power is limited by the sample size and the strength of the effect. If you have lots of people affected or the environmental effect is very strong then stats can help a lot. But for subtle effects or things that only affect a few people, stats struggles.
It isn't that scientists ignore the effect of environment it is just that for the most part to actually study those effects costs vastly more in time and money than we have available. When you get to talk the researchers you often hear things like "yeah we know there is an environmental component to [your favorite disease] but we don't have the funding to pursue it".
BTW one of my personal gripes is with the use of copper in organic farming. It really does build up in the soil. Because organic farmers don't use modern fungicides they rely too much on copper and the result is a progressive build up of copper which isn't all that great. And yes I know some organic farmers are aware of the issue and do work to avoid it.
-
Sacha
and is a sign of a physically healthy population
contradicts
doesn't exclude the influence of other factors such as novel chemical exposure etcI don’t think so. Both things could be true at the same time.
Most people would not see persistent exposure to toxic environmental substances as compatible with good health
So here’s the problem you said toxic and I said novel. If you've never eaten a banana then it is full of novel chemicals, none of which are toxic at the levels you find them in the banana.
I know most folks see the word chemical and read the word toxic. But since everything we eat and are is chemical that isn’t really reasonable.
Your comments about the industrialized agrichemical society are another issue. One close to my heart. Suffice to say that while exposure to many of the chemicals used to produce modern crops is not a great idea neither are starvation or death by afflotoxin. Like anything taken to extreme, overuse and poor controls on some of those chemicals can be very bad but they have also done tremendous good.
Recordari
I don’t mind the rant. As I said the idea that nutrition has reduced the age of puberty doesn’t exclude the influence of some of the things you are talking about. Since it’s really difficult to sort out the respective contributions and in many cases it’s really difficult to identify all the possible hormone like compounds (many of them natural in source) I don’t think it’s a profitable argument.The point he was really making is that kids are reaching puberty at a younger age (true whatever you believe the major cause to be) and that our idea that people are mature by the time they reach 18 is wrong. That means there is a gap where we probably need to re-examine how we help kids reach adulthood (whatever that is).
I also don’t think that necessarily means a “clamp down” on teenagers, but it does mean that maybe some of our assumptions about maturity ought to be looked at. Can that be a bad thing?
Note it is not my intent or desire to be a cheerleader for Professor Gluckman and I know it sounds a bit like that.
-
Gluckman knows best
Hmm unlikely. However at the risk of seeming to be a defender of Gluckman it's worth actually going to his actual speech rather than the hash made of it by the media.
Historically, the age of sexual maturation has fallen dramatically from about 16 to 17 years of age 200 years ago to between 11½ and 12½ years on average now.
The increased rate of sexual maturation has its origins in better maternal and child health and nutrition, and is a sign of a physically healthy population.
recent neural
imaging studies suggest that the human brain is not fully mature until sometime between 20 and 30 years of age.Not only has an ever-widening gap emerged between sexual maturation and maturation of the brain, but society is also much more complex than it was even 100 years ago. At the end of the 19th century, for example, individuals had relatively small social networks; contact with others was largely by personal communication or by letter or telegram. Now, radio, television, internet, cellphones, texting and Twitter all provide young people with the ability to form and maintain much more complex social networks. Although this increased use of technology obviously has some advantages, there are also risks as immature brains attempt to process and manage all of this information and the consequences inherent in these social networks.
The money quote is only one reported
These three aspects of development—increased rate of sexual maturation, a slow rate of neural maturation, and an increasingly complex social milieu – have the potential to produce a powder keg during adolescence. As a result, acting out behaviours in a number of domains, such as binge drinking, illicit drug use, unsafe sexual activity and criminal offending, are increasingly likely to occur.
Personally I think it's not an unreasonable connection to make and it doesn't exclude the influence of other factors such as novel chemical exposure etc etc.
He also points out that
On the bright side, however, many individuals are extremely resilient to these pressures and their passage through adolescence is untroubled; an important research question is to understand what makes some children resilient and others not.
Seems to me the message of his speech was that our laws and habits of child rearing have not adapted to changes in both age of puberty and more importantly for me, the fairly recent understanding that brains do not fully mature until the 20s, which is something you cannot possibly convince an 18 year old is true.
-
A leader's job is to lead.
That's a very simple view. There are times when a good leader follows and more times when a good leader identifies who has the knowledge and needs to be the one to decide the direction that the leader will take.
Equally there are times when the majority is horribly wrong and a good leader needs to take a path contrary to what the majority might want.
Not that I believe for a second that our current system throws many good leaders into the PM's position.