Estrogen exposure is a significant risk factor for endometrial cancer, which most commonly occurs in post-menopausal women. It’s a cumulative effect, as are many other things.
Not a comment on the parent post, just highlighting that biology is not so straight forward.
Had the pleasure of taking a course of his in undergrad as a newly decided philosophy major. The material was excellent and right up my alley, but more than anything I was stunned by how fluidly and clearly he communicated. Huge loss
I haven’t read that literature very closely, but will say that I have seen lots of handoffs, and they generally involve someone who has been working 12+ hours, very often 24+ hours, who needs to hand off 10s of patients to 3+ people, all of whom have things to do and can be hard to schedule around, before they can go home.
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
Fun thought, we’re kind of all on one right now! Regardless of how you choose to define “human,” we’ve been around for much less time than a single revolution around the Milky Way. We get no say in the route, and our star is feeding us rather than fueling our travel, but still a wild thought.
> While there's no doubt that self-optimization topics seem to attract more men than women, why is it that people who are into gender, equality and "toxic masculinity" topics … always have to put a label on everything, such as "This is male, this is female." They seem to be falling into exactly the trap they are criticizing.
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 assumed you were referring to ‘The Conversation’ piece actually. I’m not sure which part of the article you find woke and/or patronizing? I didn’t read it that way personally. One of the authors of the piece, Chapurukha Kusimba, is East African and seems to be a part of a group of self-described “post-colonial” scholars from the region. To me I just read actual pride for the region and its history and a desire to study it from a point of view distinct from western archeology.
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!
I had to look that one up because their interpretation seemed so unlikely to me. Doesn’t necessarily mean there is no other history there, but I found out tarballs are real things.
Oh the number of ways this model doesn’t match reality couldn’t even be counted. I suppose my standard for achieving an “artificial something” in biology is if accurately reflects reality well enough to learn from, and I only meant to imply that this might.
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!
I had the same initial reaction, but after digging in a little I don’t think “artificial” is the worst description in the world here. I do think the innovation here is much more like an artificial neuron than an artificial synapse though. Fair warning, I’m no neuroscientist and I basically don’t know what neural networks are, but here’s what I’ve gathered.
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 :)
Not a comment on the parent post, just highlighting that biology is not so straight forward.