tum92
Not a comment on the parent post, just highlighting that biology is not so straight forward.
It is not at all surprising to me that these kind of hand offs result in things being missed, and equally obvious that decreasing the patients per provider and increasing hand off window hours would at least reduce some of those errors, if not outright improve them. Bonus points for putting the peak of handoffs into late morning hours, where much more of the decision making is completed.
Of course, the only way to do that is to either:
1) drag hours out longer, which I think lots of MDs would be fine with if they weren’t expected to turn around and do it again in 18-36 hours, requiring increased staffing
Or 2) increase staffing all around and just maintain more reasonable ratios
I would disagree pretty strongly that men are more into self-optimization than women. Instead, I’d wager men are more into “Self Optimization,” which is more a unique subculture than a goal or activity, and societal ideas of masculinity get a lot of play in that space. I find it pretty understandable that people interested in gender would have something to say about the way gender interacts with that space as well.
Honestly I don’t think that people are always being deeply normative when they talk about these things, they can just see features of the culture around them they find interesting and may dislike, and say so.
For example, for the bro culture comment - I think most people would agree bro culture exists, that it’s male dominated, and that concepts of masculinity have a lot to do with it. I’ve had lots of discussions with people, men and women, who feel excluded by that culture. It feels counterproductive to take “masculinity” and what comes with it off the table for that discussion in the name of the ideal of equality, especially if that discussion might win you some real equality. An example I’ve encountered in real life was my universities chemical engineering program being know for a “bro” culture, and they had some real conversations about it and the reality that it might exclude some people, and they made changes because of it.
To be fair, I’m not sure what role the gender discussion played in this piece, and I’d probably say it detracted from the point overall, so I can understand your response to it. But I don’t think that makes the practice wrong, and perhaps both a couple of bros not aware of who it is we’re excluding?
I’m not sure why you talked about the pre-colonial slave trade specifically, but it read like you felt this article neglected the point in favor of a rosier image of the region’s history. The article does mention the perpetuation of colonial structures by East Africans after the British left (and cites an article by Kusimba). There’s no specific mention of the pre-colonial slave trade in this piece, but Kusimba has written about the “ancient practices that can be traced back more than two millennia in Africa.”[1] I find it unlikely he meant to gloss over this, and instead probably just focused on another time period.
Just to say so explicitly, I’m genuinely curious about how you perceived this article and why!
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chap-Kusimba/publicatio...
I’m curious which portion of the article you’re referring to? I’m not sure what point from the article your comment is meant to address.
I will say that my mental model does hinge on the idea that the action of a single neuron at a single point in time in a single context can actually be equated to "sum(input*weight) > threshold". Doing the actual computation to figure out a principled measure of weight (and input, context, and maybe even time for that matter) is way outside our ability, but it seems like something that could be approximated in a simple experimental model!
neuron1 -> neuron2
Neuron1 receives an input signal across a synapse, “processes” that signal, and then either does or does not pass along an output signal to neuron2. I’m sure this is an incredibly deep field of research with a lot of nuance, but I think it remains a reasonable approximation to say that neurons “fire” or not in a binary manner. A lot of the magic takes place within the neuron itself, where unimaginably complex biochemistry dictates how likely a neuron is to fire in response to an input signal. As far as I understand it, this is analogous to the application of a weight to an input in a neural network.
A decent example along these lines is how opiates influence breathing. Neurons exist at a resting negative electrical state, which can be shifted to a sufficiently positive state in response to an input that the signal propagates down the neuron resulting in the passing on of that signal to the next neuron. Opiates drive that resting negative electrical state to be even more negative, and so in response to a normal “we’re running low on oxygen here!” input, a neuron will fail to become sufficiently positive to pass that signal along the chain. In NN parlance, it’s weight has been changed.
This piece describes a memristor that replicates this weighting of inputs to produce outputs through a material that stores these weights in a material that can be adjusted electrically rather than through biochemistry. There was actually a paper[0](released just two days ago!) that uses memristors to meaningfully create an artificial neuron with biochemical synapses. Of course, there’s a lot of extra machinery involved to actually be biologically useful, but nonetheless this tech can be used as a very simplified drop-in. Of course, as you say it’s like step one in a 10 billion step process, but I don’t think it’s totally dishonest to call it an “artificial” neuron, or at least a component of one.
Of course, bragging about how fast and small it is compared to a neuron and synapse is a bit like an elementary school teacher setting up a cool grow-lamp garden to teach kids about sunlight and photosynthesis and then bragging about how they produced an ultra-minutare sun that’s so efficient it runs off an outlet :)
Lymphocytes, or T cells & B cells, are immune cells which have receptors on their surface that recognize a specific, tiny chunk of protein. For any given lymphocyte, the type of receptor on its surface is fixed for its life and that receptor is able to recognize exactly one distinct protein chunk.
Through some very cool mechanisms, very early on in life we all develop a massive number of lymphocytes, each of which recognize different protein chunks. I've not read any research which quantifies the scope here, but it's not unreasonable for the sake of a thought exercise to the assume that at one point we all have a lymphocyte receptor repertoire that's capable of recognizing every conceivable natural protein. Through what I consider one of my top 10 most jaw-dropping biological mechanisms [0], we cull the population of lymphocytes that recognize self, leaving us with a cell population capable of recognizing and responding to every non-self protein conceivable. No training is needed here, each of us at this exact moment has several T cell and B cell populations ready to recognize proteins produced by the next novel pandemic causing virus, whatever future protein mRNA vaccines might make, and whatever proteins these future mRNA therapies might produce.
What you refer to as training is probably more like immunological memory, which allows for a ramping up of the immune response on a quicker timeline. We give vaccines where it's generally not safe (or survivable) to wait out an effective immune response, because the disease causes so much havoc in the meantime. This doesn't really apply for the introduction of novel, useful proteins.
Your point about Onasemnogene abeparvovec is a very interesting one. I'm truly only guessing here, but people with SMA almost universally produce functional protein via SMN2, but very little of it. It's not enough to serve its function, but is perhaps enough for effective self-tolerance. I'm also not entirely sure about the timeline of self-tolerance development, it's possible Onasemnogene abeparvovec is given young enough to allow effective tolerance development!
Horizontal gene transfer was actually discovered before we had any consensus that DNA was the biological mechanism of heredity, and the experiments showing evidence of HGT were used as evidence for that claim.