AS someone with vanilla, I'm gonna disagree with you a bit here.
Growing your own vanilla is very difficult (assuming you're not in a place where it grows outside naturally). Not only do you need a significant amount of greenhouse space (you're right--20' minimum to flower, but the vines can grow up to 120'), you also need all the very specific orchid growing conditions--low water/nutrient, high drainage soil (or bark or similar medium), high brightness (but medium direct sun--can't let 'em burn), along with a very high humidity (vanilla orchids grow best ~80-90% humidity) and high heat (ideally not dipping any lower than 15 C, but with a bit of wiggle room). They have aerial roots, so you also need to mist with diluted nutrient mix (preferably an x-x-x fertilizer (eg: 20-20-20)) for them to get any particular growth benefit.
Assuming you can provide these conditions, you'll have to continue to provide these conditions for ~5-7 years, which is how long vanilla takes to grow from seed. Most people, however, take clippings from already healthy plants. Clippings need all the same care and effort of growing from seed, but won't flower 'til they're established and ~20 feet long (and the temperature controls are on-point for flowering), so how long they take depends on a bunch of factors, but even for a 3' clipping, you're looking at ~5 years.
So, let's say you have flowering-capable vines, at least 20', properly cared for with appropriate temperature controls to compel flowering. The vanilla flowers for one day. Furthermore, the pollination of the one-day flower must occur by hand (you cannot use natural pollinators--there's only one species of bee capable of pollinating this thing and they're not only isolated to a very specific geographic location, but they're also rather rare).
Presuming your pollination is successful it still takes, at this about, about 9-10 months for the vanilla pods to form. You'll get long green-bean lookin' things. You have to pick them as they begin to turn yellow--kinda like bananas. But the fun doesn't stop here. At this point you still have to blanche the yellowing beans, then let them sweat in a container for several weeks until you finally end up with usable vanilla pods that you might find in a store.
The process is extremely involved, incredibly time consuming and each step has a number of 'gotchas' that will ruin your vine/flowering/pollination/beans. The big effort is literally just keeping up with the very specific humidity/light/temperature/nutrient requirements for so long to even get it to be flowering capable.
Wow, that is insane. I wonder if there is some kind of opportunity here for automation and vertical farming to create economies of scale for the mass production of vanilla?
The big problem is the manual pollination and harvesting. Growing the vanilla can be done with a suitable climate in many tropical locales, but pollination requires a lot of care--you need to balance getting deep enough to actually pollinate the plant with being gentle enough to not destroy the plant. Most vanilla farmers have special tools they use to cut away parts of the flower and quickly pollinate it.
I was just wondering if 'vanilla not being hard to grow' was compared to some other orchids, which I understand to be some of the most finicky flowers to grow.
Great answer @sov, in fact if that was an easy process everyone would already have copied it [with a profit]. And it's not only about the process, the microclimates of the Sambirano valley and Sava regions of Madagascar give it a unique flavor. But that doesn't mean it can't absolutely be done anywhere else, that's only a matter of time.
It is native to Mexico, where it is pollinated by bees. But the bees only live in Mexico. Everywhere else vanilla is grown, it is pollinated by hand. I think even in Mexico, commercial growers use hand pollination.
So, the idea would be to show gitlab to... people that already use gitlab? I think this way captures a market of people who are familiar with github who want to transition to gitlab. The nature of the guide is such that we're relying on the guide writer to be knowledgeable about gitlab, but by being hosted on github we're also shown they're knowledgeable (enough) about github.
Do people just randomly browse GitHub search for tutorials on how to use GitLab? That makes no sense. I'm pretty sure all the traffic that page is getting will be from news aggregators like HN, or from search engines, both of which don't care where it's hosted. It makes more sense to have it on GitLab so you're actually seeing the features being presented without having to go to a whole other site, and to show the site can handle the traffic / use-case.
Well, then why does it even matter that it's hosted on GitHub? If GitHub is being used as little more than a public hosting page that people will directly link to, then what benefit is there from being on GitLab?
To be more specific about what I was saying earlier: the differences in form factor, features, layout, etc. are all going to be unfamiliar to those who don't know GitLab--so, presenting them a migration guide to GitLab from GitHub that's also already hosted on GitHub, with the layout and all the features they're already familiar with, is going to have a higher conversion factor than otherwise. It's not necessary that they randomly browse to this guide. Guides work because there's a smooth transition between the easy/familiar and the objective. By starting on the familiar, the guide is more inviting to follow.
I guess I can see it both ways, but in my mind, if GitLab's UI is too confusing for a new user to even navigate, then maybe it isn't good enough to migrate to. I do agree that familiarity with GitHub helps, but by that logic, a normal blog (maybe on Medium) would've been even better. The fact that it's formatted as a git repo (which is honestly sub-optimal for a tutorial), yet not hosted on GitLab, just felt strange.
My argument isn't that the README won't be easily readable
between git interfaces. My argument is mostly a) I expect that conversion rates will be higher going from GH -> GL if the guide is hosted on GH, and b) the guide is already hosted on GH, so, therefore c) you'll need a much better reason than a specious argument about dogfooding to compel a change.
I mean, it's just a git directory with a README.md--it's not like it can't be both places, but the argument from dogfooding I don't think is a good one.
Getting the word out is what the HN post is for. That's orthogonal to where the content is hosted. In addition to the confidence comment, I think it's kind of shitty.
Agreed and now all the discussion on HN is about _where_ it's hosted, instead of the content itself. It's the first thing everyone noticed. My guess is they did this on purpose just to generate controversy
You'd be correct iff a) the dwelling is occupied near-100% of the time AND b) hotels, hostels and similarly-zoned dwellings are routinely at capacity OR c) the dwelling rented is the principal residence of the owner.
Do you have data to support this w.r.t. Vancouver?
That requirement is as sensible as saying that vancouver should outlaw residents from vacationing outside vancouver to ensure there are no vacant properties. Its not the goal to maximize each minute within a housing unit, thats not something you want to focus on.
> b) hotels, hostels and similarly-zoned dwellings are routinely at capacity
There is no need to look at such thing. In this case you are trying to look at each potential dwelling unit as an abstract unit and each resident as a unit, but they have their own differences and imperfections. Looking at such a metric will push you to think policies like moving long term residents to hotels!
> Do you have data to support this w.r.t. Vancouver?
I can tell you people travel a lot more because of airbnb, and that there are way more cities that don't care about airbnb at all because it doesnt affect their housing market significantly.
> That requirement is as sensible as saying that vancouver should outlaw residents from vacationing outside vancouver to ensure there are no vacant properties. Its not the goal to maximize each minute within a housing unit, thats not something you want to focus on.
You do want people living in their homes for the vast majority of the time. You want them living there, hopefully being part of the community, getting invested in their lives there. The original argument is very sensible.
> There is no need to look at such thing. In this case you are trying to look at each potential dwelling unit as an abstract unit and each resident as a unit, but they have their own differences and imperfections. Looking at such a metric will push you to think policies like moving long term residents to hotels!
This is only sort of okay. No reasonable person who cares about housing would push to move long term residents to hotels. This is just a terrible premise to put forward.
> I can tell you people travel a lot more because of airbnb, and that there are way more cities that don't care about airbnb at all because it doesnt affect their housing market significantly.
Do they really? Like whom? AirBnB isn't particularly expensive, and all-in costs are more often than not more expensive than hotels. I don't know _anyone_ who says they travel more because of AirBnb.
> You do want people living in their homes for the vast majority of the time. You want them living there, hopefully being part of the community, getting invested in their lives there. The original argument is very sensible.
I vehemently disagree. People should be doing what they want, not what some other random person thinks they should be doing. Cities have dead periods all the time: people leave new york in the winter, or buenos aires in the summer.
The idea that a community grows stronger by putting a fence is a sad one to me.
> This is only sort of okay. No reasonable person who cares about housing would push to move long term residents to hotels. This is just a terrible premise to put forward.
It is the equivalent premise to saying that you should ban hotels so there are more long term residents, or known as, reduce short term housing stock to increase long term housing stock.
> Do they really? Like whom? AirBnB isn't particularly expensive, and all-in costs are more often than not more expensive than hotels. I don't know _anyone_ who says they travel more because of AirBnb.
You might also not hear anyone say they use cabs more because of lyft and uber but I assure you that they do. Hotels have not particularly suffered their market share because of airbnb, but airbnb is widely used in all major cities. Hostels probably took a hit, but nowhere near the usage airbnb has. Hotels ~=, Hostels -=, Airbnb ++++= => people are travelling more.
> I vehemently disagree. People should be doing what they want, not what some other random person thinks they should be doing. Cities have dead periods all the time: people leave new york in the winter, or buenos aires in the summer. The idea that a community grows stronger by putting a fence is a sad one to me.
A society's benefit takes precedent over the desires of individuals. A society wants people living in their homes most of the time. They want the majority of housing for residents with very few, specific examples such as resort towns.
> It is the equivalent premise to saying that you should ban hotels so there are more long term residents, or known as, reduce short term housing stock to increase long term housing stock.
Again, that's not the case. Hotels are purpose built, temporary places for people to stay. AirBnB is made on the premise of converting existing long-term housing in to short-term rentals.
> You might also not hear anyone say they use cabs more because of lyft and uber but I assure you that they do. Hotels have not particularly suffered their market share because of airbnb, but airbnb is widely used in all major cities. Hostels probably took a hit, but nowhere near the usage airbnb has. Hotels ~=, Hostels -=, Airbnb ++++= => people are travelling more.
I don't have any numbers here and without doing it, I'm not going to hand wave at it anymore.
>A society's benefit takes precedent over the desires of individuals. A society wants people living in their homes most of the time. They want the majority of housing for residents with very few, specific examples such as resort towns.
Okay, then if society > individuals, definitely you should not regulate airbnb over long term residents, because short term residents are a higher portion of society. Way to shoot yourself in the foot!
> Again, that's not the case. Hotels are purpose built, temporary places for people to stay. AirBnB is made on the premise of converting existing long-term housing in to short-term rentals.
Unless you have the strange assumption that hotels take no space whatsoever, they also convert long term housing to short term housing.
> I don't have any numbers here and without doing it, I'm not going to hand wave at it anymore.
One of the biggest new companies in the world, valued at multiple tens of billions, takes a 15% cut on short term rentals, hotels stocks are doing fine and you honestly believe people are not travelling more?
I suggest you talk with people you know and ask them how many times they stayed at a hotel in their lifetime and how many times they stayed at an airbnb. The answer will surprise you.
> That requirement is as sensible as saying that vancouver should outlaw residents from vacationing outside vancouver to ensure there are no vacant properties. Its not the goal to maximize each minute within a housing unit, thats not something you want to focus on.
I think you're confused about what I'm saying here. I'm not stating that this is legislation I'd hope to have passed--I'm saying that your point (short term rentals don't decrease effective housing availability in Vancouver) can only be true if certain conditions are met--your main point here, being covered in c) 'the dwelling rented is the principal residence of the owner.' This agreement with AirBnB is a step towards acknowledging this.
Mostly, though, I think your response indicates more strongly that you're just confused about Vancouver as a city. Things that work elsewhere in the world (eg: flat expansion) don't work for Vancouver due to ocean to the west, the US border on the south, and mountains/other townships already experiencing housing pains on the north and east. Things that most other places care about (eg: AirBnB tourism) don't apply so much to Vancouver, as almost all our tourists either go to Whistler or arrives on cruise ships (and thus needs no AirBnB). The hotels and hostels have more than enough capacity to handle the rest.
It's a fact of the matter that landlords buying multiple apartments to rent out temporary AirBnBs reduces housing stock, just as it's a fact that refusing to rezone certain areas of Vancouver reduces potential house stock.
> I can tell you people travel a lot more because of airbnb
I agree, but it's not pertinent to discussion w.r.t. Vancouver.
> and that there are way more cities that don't care about airbnb at all because it doesnt affect their housing market significantly.
I agree, but it's not pertinent to discussion w.r.t. Vancouver.
> It's a fact of the matter that landlords buying multiple apartments to rent out temporary AirBnBs reduces housing stock, just as it's a fact that refusing to rezone certain areas of Vancouver reduces potential house stock.
In a pre-hotel era, it could have been also argued that hotels reduce the housing stock. After all, if long term residents dont use them, you could build residents in that place.
It has to be made absolutely clear that favoring long term residents over short term residents is a matter of power not of economics. It is a modern attempt at a tariff, or at an import restriction.
Vancouver might not be able to expand sideways but it can expand up. But lets say for the sake of argument it is impossible to build even a single dwelling unit more. Who is to say what each unit provides as maximum value? Why do you think that long term residents are more valuable to the city than short term residents even when they pay less, and where do you draw the line between allowing airbnbs or banning hotels. Or putting tourist quotas or tariffs.
> I agree, but it's not pertinent to discussion w.r.t. Vancouver.
It is very much pertinent to vancouver. They have a disease that would exist with or without airbnb, which is the affordability of the housing stock. Airbnb might aggravate that like eating ice cream aggravates your indigestion. That doesnt mean the proper solution is to 'regulate' ice cream.
> In a pre-hotel era, it could have been also argued that hotels reduce the housing stock. After all, if long term residents dont use them, you could build residents in that place.
Sure, in a pre-hotel era, but then someone thought "hey what about people coming to visit our city?" and hotels were born.
> It has to be made absolutely clear that favoring long term residents over short term residents is a matter of power not of economics. It is a modern attempt at a tariff, or at an import restriction.
So? The long-term residents are the people that live in the city and actually make it what it is. They get the final say in what goes on in their own city that they pay taxes to. It's not about power--unless you mean the economic power to continue to afford to live in their city.
> Vancouver might not be able to expand sideways but it can expand up.
Sure, and I mention that as another way of alleviating housing strain--but that still doesn't absolve AirBnB renters.
> But lets say for the sake of argument it is impossible to build even a single dwelling unit more. Who is to say what each unit provides as maximum value? Why do you think that long term residents are more valuable to the city than short term residents even when they pay less, and where do you draw the line between allowing airbnbs or banning hotels. Or putting tourist quotas or tariffs.
I mean, your argument here is basically "wealthy travelers with the help of a large, wealthy corporation should be allowed to break local laws because it might be better for the economy."
> They have a disease that would exist with or without airbnb, which is the affordability of the housing stock.
Sure.
> Airbnb might aggravate that
This is a far cry from your original statement of "Short term rentals do not diminish housing stock"
> like eating ice cream aggravates your indigestion. That doesnt mean the proper solution is to 'regulate' ice cream.
So, a child eats ice cream, gets an upset tummy and demands government reconciliation therefore government regulation is silly?
A better metaphor would simply be a child eating ice cream despite being told not to by her parents, discovering that it gave her a terrible bellyache because she has lactose intolerance, and then deciding that she should regulate her ice cream intake carefully to avoid bellyaches in the future.
But I think you're just mistaken about the impetus for Vancouver to do this. I'm a fan of this regulation as I think it solves the extant problems of AirBnB (eg: people effectively operating hotels in areas without proper zoning without going through the relatively important legal hurdles to license one) while keeping the core principle in tact (ie: if you're going on vacation, it's fair to want to rent out your property for a short term occupant when you're not using it).
Post regulation: short term rentals are legal, provided that a) you acquire a license from the city to operate (note: this also protects consumers to some extant from scams), b) it's your principal dwelling, c) it's an actual legal dwelling (eg: not a hollowed out bus in an industrial park), and d) you have permission from the owner/strata.
Pre-regulation: short term rentals are illegal.
Effectively, this regulation expands the capabilities of AirBnB (good) while also limiting the effects of diminished housing in the city caused by AirBnB (good) while also providing some government-backed consumer protection (good). Literally the only people that this regulation hamstrings are property owners who own multiple residential apartments/houses that they do not live in who've been already breaking the law by allowing short-term rentals while not renting it out to long-term residents (which clearly and obviously diminishes housing stock). Sounds like a win in my books.
> Sure, in a pre-hotel era, but then someone thought "hey what about people coming to visit our city?" and hotels were born.
And someone thought what about even more of those people and airbnb was born...
> So? The long-term residents are the people that live in the city and actually make it what it is. They get the final say in what goes on in their own city that they pay taxes to. It's not about power--unless you mean the economic power to continue to afford to live in their city.
Thats your opinion. What would new york be without tourists? Or vancouver? Definitely a different city.
And they pay taxes for services they consume, not to get a privilege over stranges, that, by the way, also pay taxes. In fact, the visitors do more for the city than the actual tax paying residents. Because they bring money in, that increases the revenue of the city as well as of the individuals. If that were the bar to measure, then it would be the visitors that get to vote over the locals, since they do so much more to fill the coffers.
> I mean, your argument here is basically "wealthy travelers with the help of a large, wealthy corporation should be allowed to break local laws because it might be better for the economy."
If your main concern is companies breaking the law, then I have a proposition to satisfy you and me at the same time. Do away with the laws, and now there are no law-breakers.
> This is a far cry from your original statement of "Short term rentals do not diminish housing stock"
You are switching the definition of housing stock: they dont diminish it, they increase it. More people fit in the same space thanks to airbnb, because it extends utilization rates and adds density: it just does so at a cost to the long term resident over short term residents.
I think you're rather far off the mark here. NB: I work in this field, so, take that for what it's worth.
Yes, material recycling could be better from a pyrometallurgic perspective, but that's only an issue once a significant amount of batteries approach their EOL, so, 20+ years down the road.
It's clearly incorrect to compare the sum emissions of battery construction + lithium acquisition + cell fab + energy cost + implementation to just the diesel engine's CO2 during its burn. This is not even close to the same ballpark, as you're neglecting the costs associated with the extraction, transport and chemical treatment of the fuel.
Further, you're comparing the CO2-eq to out of date fab processes and cell chemistries, which, while based on a study published in 2014, means that it actually ignores significant industrial advances over the past decade. But, even granting little advancement in cell fab/chems, the comparison is wrong because the quality of energy available during manufacturing (the lions share of the CO2-eq) is better than the quality of energy available when the ship actually wants to use it (eg: at sea).
Lastly, comparing CO2-eq from the batteries to 100% efficient diesel is misguided. Ships don't typically use diesel--they use bunker fuel (with much worse CO2-eq than diesel), and the actual energy conversion is nowhere near 100% efficient. Inefficiencies made even more pronounced once you take into account regenerative effects on the batteries and the energy-availability delay of the fuel (lithium is on-demand, burning fuel has latency).
By "not in the same ballpark", do you mean that diesel co2 emissions are hugely bigger vs the co2 released from its combustion? I don't know the figures but this sounds surprising.
Almost entirely irrelevant, provided it's properly powered--and based on the effect size and p-values, it is. Furthermore, for an 18 month trial, 40 people is larger than most.
> probably not preregistered
I mean, true, and we should definitely promote pre-reg, but, 1. so few are preregistered that I'm not sure it's prudent to disregard a study based on this and 2. it's an academic study, neither a clinical trial nor a public-health decree--not a typical study type that necessitates pre-registration.
> Likely Publication Bias or p-hacking.
What? You're arrived at this conclusion based on... the fact that it's "small" and you couldn't find preregistration about it?
> I'm starting to get interested when it's been independently replicated.
The University of California, Los Angeles, owns a U.S. patent (6,274,119) entitled “Methods for Labeling ß-Amyloid Plaques and Neurofibrillary Tangles”, which has been licensed to TauMark, LLC. Drs. Small, Satyamurthy, Huang, and Barrio are among the inventors and have financial interest in TauMark, LLC. Dr. Small also reports having served as an advisor to and/or having received lecture fees from Allergan, Argentum, Axovant, Cogniciti, Forum Pharmaceuticals, Herbalife, Janssen, Lundbeck, Lilly, Novartis, Otsuka, and Pfizer. Dr. Heber reports receiving consulting fees from Herbalife, and the McCormick Science Institute. The manufacturer of Theracurmin, Theravalues Corporation, provided the Theracurmin and placebo for the trial, funds for laboratory testing of blood curcumin levels, and funds for Dr. Small's travel to the 2017 Alzheimer's Association International Conference for presentation of the findings.
Sorry to state this so strongly but I feel it's
important to point out that this is misinformation of the
most egregious kind.
There is no examination of statistical power in this article whatsoever so there is no basis for your
claim that this study is properly powered.
The power is only relevant when you fail to detect an effect. This is a positive study, so the power is simply not relevant to criticizing that particular study.
The nature article you reference talks about literature in aggregate, and the problem created by small studies in general, but it does not allow you to say anything about a single positive study. In fact, the place where those very authors draw their primary conclusion, they state:
Inflated effect estimates make it difficult to determine an adequate sample size for replication
studies, increasing the probability of type II errors
Which means: when you try to replicate it, you might fail because you thought the real effect size was bigger than it is, based on your estimated effect size with small n.
That's well and good, but is a problem for the replicating authors, not for these.
An even more direct point related to the current article: it was preregistered, so you know the authors have not been farming well-designed but small curcurmin studies until they did one than that was positive by chance, and then published it. The act of pre-registration goes a very long way toward addressing the issues raised by Button et al.
The power is only relevant when you fail to detect an effect.
This is absolutely false. Small, low-powered studies are more likely to produce false results than larger studies. This was well-documented by John Ioannidis over ten years ago, in work that should be required reading for all publishing scientists:
This is addressed by pre-trial registration. You can't have publication bias (his argument) when you register the study and see that this is the only one.
I know this is a dead thread: I'm answering because if you are a clinician you need to know that your understanding of the statistics is incorrect. This statistical effect has nothing to do with publication bias. If you want to continue the discussion please email me and I can explain and give copious references which will show you why.
Am I right in thinking that statistical power is the true positive rate, so a test that always rejected the null hypothesis (whether correctly or incorrectly) would have the highest possible statistical power?
Is the wikipedia page on statistical power plain wrong then?
"The power of a binary hypothesis test is the probability that the test correctly rejects the null hypothesis (H0) when a specific alternative hypothesis (H1) is true. The statistical power ranges from 0 to 1, and as statistical power increases, the probability of making a type 2 error decreases. For a type 2 error probability of β, the corresponding statistical power is 1-β. "
So according to that, if I always reject H0 whether rightly or wrongly, that means β=0 and power=1.
it's not turmeric, it's curcumin, which is about 2% of turmeric by mass (so, you'd need to eat ~4.5g turmeric daily to match study doses)
Typical Indian cooking uses turmeric in pretty much everything. I wouldn't be surprised if daily consumption of turmeric is very close to the figures you mentioned.
Interestingly, one of the recent fads I've been seeing has been for "turmeric lattes" - maybe can reach that level even if you're not keen on Indian cuisine?
Apparently, eating more than a teaspoon of tumeric a day increases the risk of kidney stones though, so don't overdo it.
I've been mixing it through my oatmeal, together with chilli-pepper and black pepper, a bit of cardamom, and a teaspoon of real cinnamon (the non-cumerin kind). While it feels like it works, I know that the placebo effect is probably much stronger than any real effect these foods have. Still, a placebo effect is still a real effect on my mood, so that's still a kind of health benefit I guess. If nothing else the spices help me wake up!
Tangent regarding health food fads: these days I mainly use nutritionfacts.org[0] to determine which of those are actually supported by the latest nutrition research. It is the only health food/diet website that I know of that directly cites nutrition research and continuously scours the latest papers for new findings - sources are always linked, and quotes are directly lifted from the papers with no modification (so less likely to suffer from "stronger or opposite of what the paper actually says"-shenanigans often seen elsewhere).
Some of the other things I tried out based on that website have too big of an effect to just be placebo: adding blue-berries to a meal really reduces sugar rushes/crashes in the hours after it[1]. Taking a table spoon of freshly broken flax seeds[2] does a lot to counter the rise in blood pressure due to my ADD medication (I measured it, plus I feel a lot less discomfort in my chest area and less jittery).
Last time I mentioned that website here, it was in a discussion of which diets are healthy. Ironically, it was the only comment in the discussion that attracted multiples downvotes without explanation, while everyone else was sharing their unsourced opinions.
A lot of things that basically boil down to budget, optimization and space available. If you have a drug that you believe you can show a strong effect with the effect group at ~15 people, maybe you run the trial with 40 (15 e.g., 15 control, plus wiggle room for drop-outs over the 18-month course and extra certainty).
Check the last few paragraphs--"The authors thank Shayna Greenberg, Dev Darshan Khalsa, and Anya Rosensteel for help in recruitment, data management, and study coordination; John Williams, University of California, Los Angeles, Nuclear Medicine Clinic, for performing the PET scans; and Vladimir Kepe, Cleveland Clinic, for developing the FDDNP-PET analysis procedures for proteinopathies in patients with neurodegenerative diseases." Add all that to the effort involved in the actual chemical extraction of the bioavailable curcumin analogue and it just doesn't make sense to add any more people than you need.
For the recruitment, data management, and study coordination piece, sounds like a great area to optimize with software. I'm sure big pharma will also happily shell out for something to help them manage their own clinical trials. Academia PIs can then get the same stuff at a lower rate.
Edit: Heck, you can even lease top grade medical space in all major metro areas and offer it as part of the package in a WeWork style arrangement. I'm sure they are tons of nuances to rolling something like this out, but it sounds like it can cut costs substantially.
If they're marketing their own drug (as implied by other comments - I don't know), you might also ask what stops them from running the studio on a 100 groups of 40 patients, and picking the "best" for publication... (other than ethics, obviously)...
As others have pointed out. Its about money. If the compound is expected to be very profitable, then it make sense to invest a lot money to do a large scale study. On the other hand, if it is a natural compound that you can't really patent, the profitability will be much lower. It doesn't make sense for a commercial entity to do a large scale study. If the compound is important enough, a government entity will sometimes invest the money to study it.
I don't' work in the field so I find it hard to interpret these studies. What's your opinion about the size of improvements in practice?
For example, How meaningful is the 20.3 point difference in Buschke SRT test?
Cohen's d (mean difference divided by SD) above 0.60 with the memory or attention seems good (73 % of the people who take the dose get above the mean test score). But difference that is detectable in a test is not telling me how big the effect would be in the daily performance unless I'm familiar with the test.
Do people actually put "objective" on a resume? It seems laughably hackneyed. My experience is that something near 40% of people have it, and it usually is the most trite sentence possible.
That's an interesting take, but not one I'd agree with.
The argument that Thiel acted unethically by funding Hogan's lawsuit is not one that I support. You can picture it as a millionaire throwing his money around to exact vengeance on a company that wronged him if you want, and that certainly feeds the idea of a sort of "chilling effect" where media orgs intentionally avoid printing things about powerful (read: rich) people. I think we can both agree that that would be truly unfortunate and a great loss of speech principles.
However, I don't think that accurately maps to the validity of the case. In an ideal world, Hogan wouldn't have had to get Thiel to fund his lawsuit--he was legitimately wronged. Is a better alternative to this universe one where news/distribution organizations can say whatever they want about anyone all the time and unless you're a billionaire you just have to take it? It wasn't like Gawker was acting ethically here. Compare it to Mother Jones, who was sued frivolously, won, and is still around!
But, of course, that's not really your argument. Your argument isn't that news orgs can be sued and that's a problem, it's that legal battles are often a matter of who has more money to spend on them, and regardless of outcome, can leave even honest organizations out of capital. I agree with this (even though Mother Jones is still around). It's unreasonable to expect MJ to pay up $2.4m to cover fees, especially when margins on online journalism are already so low (forcing worse incentives on them just to compete).
But there's hope! We don't need to wring our hands and lament the death knell of free speech--rather, we can just support anti-SLAPP laws to reduce both the cost and frequency of frivolous defamation suits. The technology exists! In fact, the only reason MJ had to pay up is because their state doesn't have anti-SLAPP statutes.
I'm fundamentally not concerned at all with Thiel buying the decaying corpse of Gawker. They acted in incredibly poor taste, noncompliance of legal orders and vitriolic defiance of journalistic good will, so, they pay the price. Rather, I'm more concerned about two issues: first, valid lawsuits require far too large an initial capital investment, preventing truly wronged but non-rich individuals from seeking justice and second, incredibly wealthy individuals can force frivolous lawsuits onto organizations where their best case scenario is a pyrrhic victory.
> In fact, the only reason MJ had to pay up is because their state doesn't have anti-SLAPP statutes.
Their state (California) wasn't the problem. The problem was that they were being sued in a different state (Idaho). You aren't safe until all the states have anti_SLAPP statutes.
