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This is often due to a mismatch of skills. What I have heard from health professionals is that health administrators typically have no medical skills, and increasingly try to force health workers to work like office workers (e.g. just use SOP, check lists instead of medical judgment to limit spending, etc.). I.e. folks who are managers and admins, tend to think that they can run all orgs the same (or at least similarly) regardless of what the mission is.

I don't want to pull it too much off topic, but we can open up a new thread to explore it further. But in short, the dark ages has fallen into disfavour among historians since around the 19th century. I could probably rattle off a couple of points off the top of my head (the historian I know is specialized in European medieval history). The origin of the term is often attributed to Petrarch in the 14th century who basically equated the decline of the Roman empire with overall cultural decline, but does not refer to technological decline as such (though again, something we could explore in a separate thread). One of the most basic criticism is the timeline. The time referred to as Dark Ages has changed but most commonly applies to the early medieval times (500-1000 AD). It covered a larger time period but especially the accomplishments in the 10th century have pushed it back by folks maybe around the 18th century or something like that. The issue is that some markers of decline (e.g. trade, surviving literary works, and son) happened either already hundreds years before (around 200 AD) and the second part is that it kind of ignores the continuation of the Roman culture in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire. Besides formal issues, there is a whole host of other issues- I was looking for a source besides books and this one seems to be somewhat reasonable (but not very in-depth) Just How Dark Were the Dark Ages? | Discover Magazine But functionally, historians have largely abandoned the term as it is rather imprecise and has connotations that do not align with what is understood now for the time period.

I know it is off-topic, but a historian friend of mine is going to be cross with me if I do not mention that the Dark Ages are a serious misnomer, based on misunderstandings.

Also, polls just before the invasion: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/02/europe/russia-ukraine-crisis-poll-intl/index.html Given the committed atrocities against Ukrainian civilians it is of little surprise that the support for NATO has only grown.

I am not sure how it is in this case, but often long-haul truckers also have to pay for maintenance and fuel. Also they are often only paid for the time driving (similar to flight crews). I.e. delays the loading docks eats severely into their salary. And while there is connection between inflation and salary, the connection is complicated and there is a different discussion to be had on that matter. But blaming things on a particular group is usually not the answer to any question. Against a background of rising cost and lower salaries it becomes simply unsustainable. This is where a Marxist view can make sense. I.e. a situation where all you have is your labour and the relative value of labour decreases, alienation is inevitable. Don't get me wrong, I am quite familiar with brute forcing ones way out of poverty (which includes sacrificing health by forgoing sleep), but increasingly, this is not possible anymore.

Also, that is not even what is commonly used. AFAIK karyotyping is really only done when indicated (such as in cases of IVF). Ultrasound is usually the first point of assigning sex (i.e. genital development).

Only partially. As we discussed many times before, it was always the case that some folks fell through the cracks. Sex was typically assigned at birth based on external sex organs, which sometimes misaligns with the karyotype, for example. The societal change really is not the definition, it is the desire not to ignore these people anymore.

I think there are some different interpretations of Grimm's folktale where basically Rapunzel's mother wanted to eat the plant from the neighboring garden (which belonged to a sorceress). The plant in question could have been either Feldsalat (Valerianella locusta) or the mentioned Campanula rapunculus. Often folks that it may refer to the former, as it likely was more commonly available, but I think it has never been really clear as "Rapunzel" could have referred to a range of salad plants.

It goes back to the issue that many categories we have are post-hoc. We make kind of groups and then define them based on the differences we see in each category. The key element really is not whether a category is "real" but whether it is useful. It is the same as the all models are wrong situation.

The issue I see here is that many folks conflate the various issues. And suddenly somehow everything is being explained by evolution, like a magic theory for everything. "I am being an arse because evolution made me to do so, please come to my TED talk."

There is a lot of speculation in this thread, but fundamentally these types of research involving humans in any form are addressed by ethics review boards following guidelines set up by major research funding agencies in a given country. The overall guidelines are pretty much the same. First, you have to assess whether there is any potential for harm of the participants. This can include things like distress, ostracization, physical harm and so on. If so, the next thing to assess is whether the harm is beyond minimal (basically more than one expects to encounter in their daily life). For example, if you interview surgeons and want to show them surgery pictures, that should not be distressing as it is part of their jobs. Showing them to non-surgeons or medical professionals could be disturbing. Then, you have to show how you mitigate harm. For example, if you interview folks regarding drug abuse, the knowledge that they participated could be harmful to them. One could mitigate that by ensuring that participation is fully anonymous, or if not, at least confidential. Mild distress could be mitigated by having a counsellor on call and so on. Generally, you need to inform folks of potential harm (e.g. distress), but if necessary, there are guidelines for the use of partial disclosure or deception. Here, the researcher has to demonstrate why deception is necessary and that it does not cause undue harm. Generally you are also required to report back to the participants what the study was really about (i.e. debriefing). At this stage typically participants have to be able to withdraw their consent. However, direct risks associated with the study have to still to be disclosed beforehand.

Also, I have mentioned that many pages back, in paralympics folks have established a many scoring systems for impairments to ensure that in a given categories equivalent athletes compete. This includes team sports which have to have certain compositions in order to compete (e.g. based on available range of motions). In other words, there are already examples for finer and more detailed categories in sports and question is not really whether it is feasible, but more what measures could be used for each athletic activity.

yo.

I think this is one of the many cases where folks misinterpret what evolution is. Evolution is fundamentally the change of the gene pool in a population over time. What individuals do on a day-to-day basis really has little to do with evolution or evolutionary benefits. For example, the ability to vocalize can have evolutionary advantages, but the details of what is being said, is not genetically encoded. Well, there is also slang within areas where jargon is used. In labs, for example we often use informal short hand (or sometimes lab-specific invented words) to refer to stuff which never translates into formal jargon. Scientists, especially when talking informally amongst themselves rarely uses stilted high-brow language. That is mostly for papers and lectures (depending on your style). I think that is just a weird perception folks have.

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There are many (good) classic books also in other sciences, and it is interesting to see that quite a few are not in English (which is almost unthinkable today). Biology has changed a fair bit, but on some of the more complex topics, quite a few old microbiology books still absolutely brilliant (and in many ways surpass modern ones). While most are in English, some have sentence structures that are quite clearly written by a German, which amuses me to no end. Well, until I read my own writing that is. Another funny story is that I learned all of my basic chemistry and physics in Germany, so while I am fluent in biology-English, I sometimes have to convert basic chemistry and physics in my mind from German to English.

No doubt about that. It was really just a niggling thought at the back of my mind in terms of accuracy. But regarding impact and persecution it is of course not relevant. And luckily Germany lost all that talent! If they had been mindful about the way they expressed their ideology (as folks do nowadays), it could have ended way worse.

Not that it is important and (luckily) Germany lost a lot of Jewish scientists, but for some on the list, I am not sure whether they were really Jewish. Most did have some some connection to Judaism, and I may be misremembering stuff (as my infatuation with individual scientists faded a fair bit after high school) but: Niels Bohr had a Jewish mother, but the father was Lutheran, Erwin Schroedinger was in my memory had a somewhat pantheist view (not sure about household religion), Wolfgang Pauli had Jewish heritage but was raised catholic. Again, these are really just nitpicks without real relevance as they did face persecution because of their connections, regardless whether they were practicing Judaism or not.

Same here, though the time commitment is probably a bit of an issue. While the movie is presumably very good, one has to be a big careful about this bit: A movie about a person is probably a very bad way to learn about that person. A primary role of movies is to entertain and not to inform. It invariably is a dramatization of a particular interpretation of a person. A movie is story telling and stories do not have to be truths.

Another important element can be to check whether a person actually has expertise on a given field. Especially in modern sciences, fields tend to be fairly narrow and the more in detail the question is, the more specialist an expert has to be to provide meaningful insights.

One important step, and something that folks are slowly start to agree on (though some voices might say that it is because the opioid pandemic has now also decimated white communities) is that drug abuse should be seen primarily as a public health crisis, and not primarily a criminal one. That is why the measures outlined above make more sense, as they focus on intervention and treatment, rather than punishment.

A bit off topic, but fairly recently there have been many allegations against (male) elite players and chess coaches. A chess champion took the lead and apparently it opened up investigations regarding wide spread harassment and sexual misconduct in chess. I think the idea that cerebral folks are somehow above such behaviours should get tossed onto the pile of bad stereotypes (heck, open sexual harassment in the science community was fairly common for a long time, only to be replaced by covert, and only now may it actually see consequences).

There are a lot of papers out there on phantom traffic jams (i.e. jams by folks breaking which then perpetuates down the line)- a cursory search showed over 1k publications (at the very least). There are also many papers promoting suggestions, which mostly seem to focus on a collaborative system and/or technical devices that can simulate or promote such behaviour. However, the most interesting paper on traffic jam avoidance to me is this one here, for perhaps obvious reasons: https://elifesciences.org/articles/48945

There you have to be careful, too. One has to be very clear what one is actually testing with a given experiment. More often than not, infant experiments are behavioural tests and one uses them to check on developmental cues. The underlying biological basis is often not well understood. Take the mentioned Still-Face experiment, for example. It does indicate that early on infants are able to recognize and react to facial expressions (the first step in the experiment is about setting up a baseline that the infant learns and distinguishes from the neutral expression step). It does not tell us much about the biology except that infants are able to recognize and distinguish facial expressions and that they build up expectations based on interactions and do get distressed when these expectations are not met. How it actually works is unclear and as such the biological basis. A deviation from a particular behaviour does not necessarily mean genetic change, either. Taken from that, all we can basically just say that without training infants are able to: - identify faces - build up expectations based on interactions - have a mechanism to feel distress when expectations are met (I am sure one can break this down even finer, but the overall point is that these are really just general insights that are more conceptual still far removed from the underlying biological mechanisms). Even infant behaviour is often dynamic and responsive to cues and tracing them to a genetic basis (outside of reflexive behaviour) have proven to be very difficult to identify, and there is little in terms of actual "proof" to be found. I am not saying that all hypotheses in this regard are automatically wrong, but rather than we start to realize that that we need a higher level of evidence to actually identify the mechanisms. Especially in humans, these are often lacking.

I should have made it more clear what I thought about the paper, my bad. Similar to the others it does not offer any biological insights, but rather discusses the aspects on a conceptual level linking it to learned behaviour, which is still in the purview of psychological sciences. Towards the end it veers of quite a bit again into the just-so story region, which has become fairly common since the rise (and perhaps also through the fall) of evo-psych. But at least the first part is something that one could discuss about as it stays more within the purview of psychology (i.e. does not venture too far out into the bio realm.). I will also note that the Terrizzi & Shook as well as the Fessler paper have similar issues. I.e. there is a large conceptual framework, or narrative, but data that can be used to test or invalidate hypotheses are lacking (or are very crude and often not robust). In human genetics (in the biological realm) there is increasing realization that our genes alone are much less defining than originally anticipated (to large part caused by the increase of sequencing data and GWAS). As such the field of evo psych is still behind the curve. Again, there is good reason to believe that shame and other behaviour in a moral system can have important social functions. But introducing genetics without actual genetic data, is a big stretch that folks are increasingly skeptical about (and rightfully so). That is basically the issue, the studies speculate about it, but as far as I can see, there is no evidence. Beyond that the basic brain functions are involved. But that is a bit like saying that the system for pottery is genetic as it involves hands and eyes which have a genetic basis. It is not entirely wrong, but also so broad as to be meaningless.