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The overall fatality rate cannot be fully assessed with the data at this time, though as preliminary estimate it tracks around 2-3% which is lower than, e.g. SARS with is caused by a different coronavirus was around 15%, but higher than e.g. seasonal influenza (around 0.15%). I should add that the new coronavirus (2019 -nCoV) also has seemingly lower transmission rate compared to influenza, roughly in line with SARS.

The good news is that the incidence rate is still below the seasonal flu, even in Hubei province. But the question is how it is going to develop. Most cases do not seem to be severe.

In order to keep the various discussions on specific presidential candidate plans focused I would like to use this thread to allow for a broader and comparative discussion on college tuition. In this thread I would like to discuss the various models in circulation to make higher education more affordable, but also to discuss potential drivers of increasing college cost. For starters I would like to mention that a number of contributors have been identified, but studies are not entirely in agreement with each other. One issue that has been discussed is the so-called Baumol's cost disease. In traditional economics wage growth is related to productivity increase. However, in service jobs, such as college tuition, productivity typically does not increase but in order to attract faculty their salary increases despite the lack of productivity increase. Other factors include increase in student amenities to attract students, as well as the increasing ratio between administration and faculty. Another, rather obvious but seemingly not quite as often discussed factor is the decline in public funds for universities. In most cases, the support for students has been in decline. Student tuition have never paid fully for the education cost, but were always covered partially by public funds. Those have dropped dramatically over the last decade (fueled by the recession) and are still on average over 16% below pre-recession times. But even before the recession funds were declining resulting increasing costs being covered by tuition fees. Finally there is also the so-called Bennet effect which associates increasing availability of student loans with increasing tuition fees. However, this was only clearly shown in for-profit institutions. It should be noted that these really only apply to the US and to some extent the Canadian models, as in other countries, such as Germany, there is only a nominal administrative fee (a few hundred bucks per semester, which usually also provides free transit). We can also discuss that, if you'd like. Using these aspects as a starting point I would invite folks to discuss their thoughts on this matter, including the various takes from the US presidential candidates.

Oh yeah. The issue with learning a little bit about anything just makes you appreciate how little you actually know about it. The bad news is that it generally does not get better (except perhaps, theoretically in very small, specialized and contained areas of knowledge). The good news is that you eventually learn to enjoy it.

You and MigL are not wrong, part of the issue is that OP, which is itself a split was started as a criticism on a specific plan. The discussion has evolved to a more general discussion regarding college debt models. However, moving into that direction will dilute the focus on Warren's plan. I feel that only after three pages the details of the plan were outlined which should be the start of the conversation, before veering off into another direction. Since we do not have a traditional OP who could suggest where the focus of the discussion should be, I suggest that we stick to Warren's plan and its implications first, whilst staff discusses whether we should merge the threads. I would also invite MigL's and iNow's input for opening the scope in this discussion (as they seem to be closest to what could be considered OPs).

Also, in the supply-demand model one should also remember that most colleges are not for-profit. Even if they have to meet a higher demand tuition is typically only raised if there is a shortage in federal and state funding (which is an ongoing issue in many areas). The so-called Bennett hypothesis which claimed that student loan availability is a factor increasing tuition cost has so far only been demonstrated conclusively in for-profit universities. Public unis usually pass on suprlus back to the students. Perhaps paradoxically, when universities are competing for students tuition costs can go up as the universities add (costly) amenities to attracts students. This is especially true for universities with high-income student bodies and low admission thresholds.

Yes in the primaries the parties essentially vote for their candidate to run for the presidency.

The deliver is a major challenge. You cannot simply inject proteins and hope that they will act at the right area. For one, it will be too dilute and on top it will trigger immune responses. What needs to happen is that the system has to be introduced into infected cells, in which the Crispr-Cas system will be expressed. That, typically is achieved via transfection, in which a cell is infected with a virus carrying Crispr-Cas as load. There are also non-viral delivery methods in development but they all share the issue of immunogenicity, but also unintended insertions and mutations. It is still a long way until the method is suitable as an in vivo viral therapy.

I think they may vote for witnesses once they are certain enough that the narrative has sufficiently changed. As can be seen, it went from "Trump did no such thing" and there was no "quid pro quo" to it is entirely normal presidential behaviour and he is just a victim of Democrat overreach. Once the latter is repeated sufficiently, it simply become irrelevant what he did. And once that is established, it does not matter what of witnesses are being called. You recall Trump's claim that he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose voters? We are there right now. In other words, they have successfully demonstrated that accountability is apparently just an illusion.

Almost by definition, if you cook long enough you can kill most things. But normal cooking is sometimes not long enough. Also note that often dry heat is less effective than wet heat. That makes heating of dry spices often inefficient in killing pathogens, for example. That being said, viral infection are uncommon with cooked food, but are more likely due to infected food handlers (especially in ready-to-eat-food), or undercooked/uncooked food. However, there are also enteric bacteria that have acquired heat resistance that are on the rise. Boiling for a long time will kill them, but short heating steps as common in food processing, may not. As Strange mentioned there are also highly resilient sporulating bacteria. Prions, again are a different category, as they are not pathogens, just short peptides. And yes, human meat is especially bad for you. It carries a lot of pathogens that, well are good at infecting humans. The host may be resilient against them but the aspiring cannibal may not be. But again, if you cook or autoclave long enough much is theoretically safe (barring things like toxins, as Strange already pointed out), but you'd be basically eating protein goo.

How is it equal opportunity if some folks can enjoy the benefits of higher education whereas others are restricted from it due to financial constraints? I am not sure why that is hard to believe. Of course I'd rather not pay either, but I do not think it is sufficiently upsetting to deny it to deny benefits to others just not to feel bad. At least that makes much less sense to me. You mean non-majority identity politics?

Try to pipette into existing solution if possible. Lacking that, press the press all the way down, then use wall of the tube to release the last drop. Pull the pipettor up and then slowly release the plunger.

Not a field biologist here, but wouldn't it be the easiest to count them into separate categories? That way you do not lose data but can present the difference in findings using either measure.

To my knowledge microwaves do not do something fundamentally different to food than other heat sources. What is more important is the overall setup of the cooking method including temperature, length of heat exposure, presence of solvents into which nutrients can transition into (e.g. boiling or deep frying) and so on. A such, studies have shown that the loss of vitamins during microwaving is fairly similar to other cooking methods and may be superior to those where loss can be attributed to higher extraction efficiency (e.g. steam cooking). Many of the listed components are stable at temperatures much higher than used for regular cooking. There are a few heat labile vitamins, but carbohydrate and protein content generally does not change with most cooking methods. One thing to remember is that larger molecules, such as proteins, are not used as a whole, they have to be degraded to smaller bits and pieces before we can actually take them up (which is done by treatment with various enzymes detergents acids etc. in our digestion system). One reason why microwaved food has a bad rep is because food specifically designed for the microwave are often heavily processed and are made to be palatable just by heating it up. But they are rarely made to provide a balanced diet.

I would not discount that even in the absence of propaganda a sizable proportion of the population would still vote solely along party lines, because that is what they always did.

It is one of the issues that are going to be increasingly difficult to contain due to increasing mobility of folks. Right now there are ca. 800 infections and the Chinese government has restricted travel in a possibly unprecedented scale. It should be noted that this at bets highly speculative. Bats are a suspected reservoir, but nothing is certain yet. A cooked soup is less likely to be the culprit than direct contact with one. But again, it is not sure whether the virus originated from bats in the first place. It just has similarities to some known to be found in bats.

Could be the composition of the fora, then. While the overall community is relatively small here, it has quite a few degree holders as well as active scientists who can provide insights at least in certain topics. The type of debate is likely going to be a bit different than exclusively among enthusiasts.

The decrease in support by Republicans is interesting. Considering that there have been no revelations that put Trump in a better light (quite the opposite, actually) it does appear that party loyalty wins out.

Well, for some the topic can feel more personal. If you are a biologist (or even an evolutionary biologist ) and there is a strong movement that denies the reality of it, it has real impact on your work.

i do not quite get what you are arguing as you seem to state even a secondhand implication of ignorance or a lie would be disallowed elsewhere. I find it rather hard to believe. If someone states that there is no consensus on what the sun is and why it is bright, is there a way to point it out without implying that the poster is either ignorant of the facts or lying about what is known? Because if that is the case it means that one would need to treat every crackpot idea the same way as actual knowledge. And if we start with this equivalency it basically means we have no knowledge at all, just opinions.

The quote appears to be a general comment and does not seem to be directed at a specific person. As such it does not seem to call a particular user a liar. This is not semantics but an important distinction. Second, it also leaves the door open that folks argue from a point of ignorance rather than deliberate deception.

There is an interesting article in The Atlantic has made an interesting argument regarding constitutionality of the senate procedure (esp. with regards to prevention of witnesses). It hinges a bit on this bit here:

I disagree, you will only get a superficial idea of what is going on. The dogma is such a superficial narrative that is not really helpful other to grasp the concept that there is information flow. Even though I would argue that by now it is omitting too many elements to be really useful. Grasping the concept does not really provide a level of understanding that is useful to conduct research. Understanding mitochondria requires quite a significant amount of biochemistry to understand nutrient flows and redox reactions. If you start manipulating the system you need those tools in order to predict what is going to happen. It is getting far more complicated once you move away from mitochondria and go into the generalities of respiration among other organisms, too. Again, that his high-school knowledge. If you go higher upper semesters that won't get you far. And rather obviously if one wants to do some research or analytics on lipids it would be rather hopeless. I will state that much of my opinion is based on higher level biology. If you aim for a Bachelor's one could get by with just fulfilling the prerequisites (which nonetheless often do requires basic level maths/chemistry/physics as mentioned above, depending on institution).

And on top of that, the differences are not what are typically considered to be "typical" dimorphisms (i.e. there is often substantial overlap between sexes). Also, it is difficult to correlate any neural morphologies with altered functions, which is why there are actually only rather few tests where we see reliable differences. And even there, the effect size is often not terribly huge. As mentioned, training could presumably close these gaps which makes it difficult to assess what features are truly sex differences in the biological sense. That is not to say that there are none, but given the plasticity of brains it would be strange to assume that especially abstract abilities would result in such pronounced differences as expressed in OP. To wit, I would take any bet that if I provided a female group with access to information, education and training while growing up while depriving the same to a male group, it won't be the latter who will figure out how to design a car or rockets first (note: don't do that, it won't pass ethics review). The point about subjective vs objective does not make any sense whatsoever, btw.

I am not entirely sure whether that is the case. The senate vote was for most a foregone conclusion. As we have discussed earlier, it is almost certain that Trump is going to be acquitted no matter what. In that regard, I think the only political capital to be made from the situation is to make a case that a) the impeachment is a moral necessity regardless of the outcome in order to highlight the abuse of the office, b) the WH is actively trying to hide information (which seems to work as there is overall strong public support for additional witnesses in the senate trial) and now c) demonstrate that the GOP is complicit with the WH in withholding information (why would someone innocent hide info?). It is pure speculation on my part, but I suspect that drawing it out for longer could result in the public losing interest (but before the articles were transmitted McConnell indicated that he had the voice to force the procedure, so I am not sure how that plays into it). Either way, I think for most folks the outcome is already clear, so it is about presenting a good narrative.