CharonY

Russia is quite at the bottom of the pack, rank 123, same as Mali and Serbia. Jordan and Lithuania and Benin are close by (120) as well as Montengro and Palestinian territory (127). Full report Edit: cross posted, was meant as a reply to Acme's post.

Only tangential to the discussion,but in most rankings, but the linked article is a badly written opinion piece and cherry-picks numbers without providing context (e.g. donations of other nations, fraction of GDP or other nomalization etc.). These types of articles really grind my gears. For example the tsunami (2004) help from the USA was 0.026% of the GDP, whereas Australia offered 0.255%. This was actually one of the cases where the US responses were comparatively low . That being said, according to most metrics the US is among the most charitable nations (usually within the top twenty). According to the World Giving Index (which is poll based and e.g. asks whether one would help strangers) the USA has currently the highest score (followed by Canada and Myanmar).

It is crucial to demonstrate literature knowledge and elucidate how your research results fit into the overall context of things we know and how it adds to the existing canon. Papers that come to similar conclusions with different methods for example can provide more evidence for the proposed hypothesis. What you should stop doing is thinking of your references as a type of section that needs to be bolstered or tuned. It is your manuscript (discusion/intro/whatever) that needs to be bolstered and you do it with references. The length of the reference list is just a consequence thereof and totally irrelevant. If you have done reading the lit and citing key references then you have automatically the perfect number of references.

ydoaPs, on 04 Apr 2014 - 09:15 AM, said: This is not as much a rule but just how citing works. Any information above basic textbook stuff has to be referenced. But you do not squeeze in unneeded references. One possible exception is if you anticipate a particular referee and you have not cited any work of her/him. But as ydoaPs said, the references should be based on what you have written down. If you have too few references it only means that you provided insufficient information. But if you justification and discussion is good as it is, it does not need anything else. I assume that you have also references in the discussion? With few exception you need to bring you results into context of the existing literature. Crossposted and messing up formating.

This is true for almost any ongoing research. Is mental health underfunded? Possibly. Much more goes into cancer than into mental health, I would guess (just looking at publication numbers, would need a split of the actual funding to be certain). As I said above shizophrenia is a mix of conditions, whereas alzheimer's is a specific one, which is why I do not think it is a very good infographics. The NIMH indicates a 12 month incidence of 1.1% of US adult population whereas dementia the prevalence is about 6%, for example. And due to the changes in demographics the latter is likely going to be a increasing issue.

That may very well be the case. By my question still is: "is research in schizophrenia underfunded?". I.e. how much does it receive? A search in journal database shows 108126 papers in which "schizophrenia" is a keyword. "Alzheimer" yields 73332 papers (multiple sclerosis about 60k). These are only rough indicators but it shows that there is quite some active research going on. As such I would think that the premise as presented in OP is quite flawed. That being said, I do think that investment in mental health is important, but the amount of research clearly indicates that scientists are looking into it.

If you start a discussion it is customary to provide the context and not to start in the middle of things and let the reader pick up the pieces you throw at them. So yo did establish that people were harassing scientists. Fine. I assume the discussion would be whether that is a bad thing? Well, on a science forum you will probably find few that would argue that point. In post #8 a libel law appears for the first time. If that was a major discussion point it would have been nice to bring that at the top. Since you are trying to discuss something without explaining what it is I googled it and it appears that Obama signed legislation that protects Americans from Britain's libel laws. So what is the discussion? The fact that the UK has libel laws that could be abused or that the US tries to protect Americans from it...? What I am saying is that you are highly erratic and it requires significant amount of clairvoyance to try to figure out what the topic actually is.

And even if they were, what is the point of discussion? Actually IIRC the author found a correlation between climate deniers and affiliation to the republican party (not the libertarian afaik) and I think iNow has in the past linked articles to that effect. I am quite surprised that this is supposedly about a discussion signed by Obama, which is not further described and a post later it turns into soapboxing again. For that, a blog is a much better place than a discussion forum.

I am not sure. How much funding does it receive? That being said, since we do not have a good grip on mechanism it could be a bit tricky to formulate a good research plan. At least compared to diseases where one can start with a strong hypothesis.

There are approaches for toxicity tests in which in vitro models of tissues and organs are used. However, these approaches are still in their infancy and are most likely only be useful for minimizing need for animals rather than a real replacement.

The only logical conclusion is that you are a prophet.

It will become available once they manage to increase yield and decrease cost. Right now it is not profitable to produce it.

I am not sure what you try to discuss here. Schizophrenia (to my limited knowledge) is not a precise diagnosis but tends to be based on a number of symptoms. As such one can not easily compare incidence with other, much more narrowly defined health conditions. It would be a bit to compare incidence of pain with hereditary diabetes. It is very likely that there are very different mechanisms involved which makes it quite difficult to research. There are some advances and brain imaging technologies have found certain alterations that are quite often associated with schizophrenia. However there are quite differences between individuals and (again, to my knowledge) the relevance is not quite clear. Creating useful treatments is even trickier, of course.

What precisely is your point?

Intelligence influences number starting languages, highest spell level and number of spells you get. Wisdom gives you bonus to faith-based spells.

I think the point is that someone needs to read up more on principles of statistics and stochastics.

Mutations are not magic. They do not allow cells suddenly to overcome biochemical limitations nor can they override biology (in the latter case you simply have dead cells). Most of the things you describe are not how the cell actually works. Apoptosis is a coordinated degradation of cells, and not a sudden burst with uncontrolled release of intracellular content for example. I really do not think that these kinds of speculations are worthwhile, if the very basics of cellular functions are clearly so misunderstood.

I am pretty sure this is supposed to be an April's fool joke. But then half of the threads in the speculations section are more or less like this. Of course the answer is still 42, but the question is still wrong.

You are misunderstanding what the 1% flammability limit means. The limits are expressed at atmospheric pressure (in air). I.e. for phosphine it means that in a given volume 1.8% of the gas has to be phosphine in order to produce a flash of fire with an ignition source). Even if all phosphate in a cell, which, btw. is less than 1% in weight per cell as much of the weight of phosphate is in bones and enamel, would be transformed to phosphine (which, to re-iterate, simply would not happen), you have a highly dilute phosphine solution in water, not phosphine gas in air. It would not burn nor autoignite. The point is that a) there is no way that phosphine production would happen in a living body and b) even if it did there would be no fire. Further speculation on that is quite meaningless as chemistry as well as biology tells us that it ain't gonna happen. You want an animal to produce something hot? Look at the bombardier beetle, which produces hydrogen peroxide and a hydroquinone. And nope, mutations will not allow us to do that.

It does not matter how much the enzyme would accumulate (realistically it would just be degraded) however the limiting factor is the total cellular amount of phosphate per cell. Even if all of the phosphate in a cell would be converted to phosphine (which would kill the cell way before a significant amount of phosphine is generated) you would have a tiny amount ). You will have essentially a highly aqueous environment with a tiny amount of oxygen and phosphine. There is no chance that something will happen under that circumstance (not even talking how unlikely the magic enzyme is going to pop up). In the Frank Baker case I have not seen anything but an apparent interview (i.e. medical records that would establish what happened). Without it the report is not more reliable than that of UFO abduction victims.

The scenario with mutant cells is highly unlikely for various reasons. Not the least of it that even if you had an aberrant cell, the overall production would be low, considering the access to phosphate the cell has. Also the highly low amount of phosphine would only have limited access to oxygen etc. Bacteria may release phosphine during certain catabolic activities, but it takes quite a lot of decaying matter to produce measureable amounts. There is the hypothesis that acetone produced by ketosis could be a factor, but it is generally assumed that an external (if unknown) fire source is involved. Again, the main hypotheses are that there are burnable elements in the human body (be it body fat or some alcohol) that could be set on fire by some means. This does not generally happen in the absence of some accelerator as a body is mostly water and would require quite a lot of energy to combust. And I should re-iterate that the to my knowledge all these cases were determined post-mortem and due to unusual fire patterns (i.e. body burnt but limited damage to surrounding). I.e. I found no reports of survivors which makes the claim in the OP highly unlikely. Also I am not sure what AdvRobotics tries to claim. It is a pretty well known fact that animals body do not burn well. They normally char under high temps as anyone who grilled a steak knows. And these pieces of meat are actually much drier than a live. People that set themselves to fire douse themselves with gasoline for a reason, btw.

There are Bunsen burners that work with gas cartridges but operate the same as the gas line ones.

Water is water, it is not designed for anything. Also what does purity has to do with it? Do you mean that fires can only be extinguished by double-distilled water...?

Yes there are, if you replace elements with inorganic compounds. Sunlight is not even necessary as the light reaction is but one of the means to generate energy without oxidation of organic sources. Generally the role of organic substrates are to provide a) building blocks for biomass (mostly C and depending on organism also N) and b) provide energy by either reducing equivalents which are necessary to generate energy or direct generation of ATP via substrate level phosphorylation. Litotrophic bacteria can generate the reducing equivalents by oxidizing diverse inorganicconmpounds including ferrous iron, ammonia, nitrite, sulfur, hydrogen etc, In other words, for energy generation in some cases elemental forms can be utilized. This is not the case for the generation of biomass, however. While some bacteria (the nitrogen fixers) can utilize elemental nitrogen, this is not possible with carbon. In this case they have to use CO2 via the Kalvin cycle. Edit: crossposted with John

It is incredible (or maybe expected) how arrogance is so often paired with ignorance. Just because it is biology it does not mean that one can flaunt one's half-knowledge and get away with it (well to be fair, according to anecdotes Feynman did it for some time as a student, but then he was brilliant). In physics people would at this point rightfully point out: "show me the math". The same should be done here. However a single sentence: Betrays almost the whole lack of knowledge on the subject matter. It appears that overtone assumes that in order to investigate population dynamics or evolutionary events researchers would dream up a scenario with all possible events (stochastic or not) and other confounding factors and then magically come up with a model that explains everything. That would be a futile exercise at best. Instead researchers either have a specific hypothesis (e.g. do we see selective forces at work for that trait in that population, e.g. by estimating selection coefficients for certain traits) depending a bit on the type of data you can realistically collect. Then you run your statistic analyses (that, again have to be specific for your question and being suitable for your data set), then you draw conclusions. The models that you try to fit have to fulfill certain assumptions to be valid, and one thing that Chad pointed out is that the calculated selection coefficient would only be valid if population continuity was assured. The reason (to re-iterate a point) is because the calculations are not correct if migration and admixture (or other factors like random drift) actually occurred, but were not taken into account. Therefore, these studies should include approaches to test whether these may skew the results (if at all possible). The way Overtone argues is what one could consider a type of narrative evidence. Skin color correlates with vitamin D metabolism hence in all cases we got strong selection going on there. This is fine to a point, but then you have to go through the same process as roughly outlined and and actually demonstrate it. Obviously, we do not expect people to actually go out and collect data. However, if you put forward such a hypothesis, it is generally expected to provide some literature to support your assertions. Just to make it clear, biology is science and speculations will only get you so far. One may impress laypersons with that but scientists will tell you :"Data or GTFO". Anecdotes or inductive reasoning are not acceptable substitutes and this goes for all sciences. Edit: crossposted with modnote.