On an iPad I can't read the web page at all. The insert at the upper right overlies and obscures the main body of text.
It'd also be a good starting point to be more concrete in your ambitions. What version of C is your preferred starting point, the basis for your "Better C"?
I'd also suggest the name "Dependable C" confuses readers about your objective. You don't seek reliability but a return to C's simpler roots. All the more reason to choose a recognized historical version of C as your baseline and call it something like "Essential C".
It's understandable that unusual patients are seen as confounding variables in any study, especially those with small numbers of patients. Though I haven't read beyond the abstract, it also makes sense that larger studies (phase 3 or 4) should not exclude such patients, but perhaps could report results in more than one way -- including only those with the primary malady as well as those with common confounding conditions.
Introducing too many secondary conditions in any trial is an invitation for the drug to fail safety and/or efficacy due to increased demands on both. And as we all know, a huge fraction of drugs fail in phase 3 already. Raising the bar further, without great care, will serve neither patients nor business.
Having been an "investigator" in a few phase 3 and 4 trials, it is true that all actions involving subjects must strictly follow protocols governing conduct of the trial. It is extremely intricate and labor intensive work. But the smallest violations of the rules can invalidate part of or even the entire trial.
Most trials have long lists of excluded conditions. As you say, one reason is reducing variability among subjects so effects of the treatment can be determined.
This is especially true when effects of a new treatment are subtle, but still quite important. If subjects with serious comorbidities are included, treatment effects can be obscured by these conditions. For example, if a subject is hospitalized was that because of the treatment or another condition or some interaction of the condition and treatment?
Initial phase 3 studies necessarily have to strive for as "pure" a study population as possible. Later phase 3/4 studies could in principle cautiously add more severe cases and those with specific comorbidities. However there's a sharp limit to how many variations can be systematically studied due to intrinsic cost and complexity.
The reality is that the burden of sorting out use of treatments in real-world patients falls to clinicians. It's worth noting level of support for clinicians reporting their observations has if anything declined over decades. IOW valuable information is lost in the increasingly bureaucratic and compartmentalized healthcare systems that now dominate delivery of services.
how do you figure? absolute SAE rate increases 2 percentage points. nothing changes about relative SAE rate. does it change anything about your choice between different health technologies? no.
The SAE rate increases 2 percentage points on average, as I understand it - not necessarily uniformly across interventions. It could be the case that medicine A has 4% SAE in healthy patients, and 5% in unhealthy* ones, whereas medicine B has 3% SAE in healthy and 6% in unhealthy - and without testing on unhealthy patients, you don't know that medicine B is riskier for those patients than A.
It could be that I'm totally misunderstanding, and that every medicine has the same elevation of risk of SAE for unhealthy patients, but that seems unlikely to me. You do have 'doctor' in your username though, so I'm probably embarrassing myself here.
*apologies for the healthy/unhealthy terminology, I don't know the right lingo to use here.
As the article says, this change in opinion has been very big and very recent. Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me.
The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.
> Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
> The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost.
I think the problem is that universities _have_ been changing in the direction of _delivering less_ at the same time that they cost more. The article cites public schools doubling tuition in inflation-adjusted terms since 1995, but simultaneously:
- student-faulty ratios have gotten worse
- schools use under-paid adjuncts for a larger share of classes
- good schools often trade on the research record of faculty, but the success of those prominent faculty often mean they can get course buyouts / releases, so they're not teaching anyway
Rather than trying to make new online offerings, I think schools need to lean out their staff, and cut back on programs that don't have to do with instruction. Even better would be if federal funding eligibility was tied to schools demonstrating that at least X% of their budget goes to instruction, where that X should ratchet up over time.
The author neglects to observe that doubling tuition over 30 years equates to only a 2.35% inflation rate. That sounds pretty close to the US inflation rate during that time, so increases in tuition cost have been held in check pretty well.
No, if anything the article has a copyedit error in saying twice in one sentence that the doubling is after inflation-adjustment.
> While there have been some small declines in tuition prices over the last decade, when adjusted for inflation, College Board data shows that the average, inflation-adjusted cost of public four-year college tuition for in-state students has doubled since 1995.
Dedicated grad schools that are separate from, but affiliated with, dedicated undergrad schools. Those teaching at the dedicated undergrad schools will be hired for their ability to focus on foundational teaching, with research programs designed to involve undergraduate student researchers in genuine research, while still providing publication opportunities and genuine advancement of the art.
I think the curation of all media content using your own LLM that has been tuned using your own custom criteria _must_ become the future of media.
We've long done this personally at the level of a TV news network, magazine, newspaper, or website -- choosing info sources that were curated and shaped by gatekeeper editors. But with the demise of curated news, it's becoming necessary for each of us to somehow filter the myriad individual info sources ourselves. Ideally this will be done using a method smart enough to take our instructions and route only approved content to us, while explaining what was approved/denied and being capable of being corrected and updated. Ergo, the LLM-based custom configured personal news gateway is born.
Of course the criteria driving your 'smart' info filter could be much more clever than allowing all content from specific writers. It could review each piece for myriad strengths/weaknesses (originality, creativity, novel info, surprise factor, counter intuitiveness, trustworthiness, how well referenced, etc) so that this LLM News Curator could reliably deliver a mix of INTERESTING content rather than the repetitively predictable pablum that editor-curated media prefers to serve up.
That's the government regulation I want but it's probably not the government regulation we will get because both major constituencies have a vested interest in forcing their viewpoints on people. Then there's the endless pablum hitting both sides, giving us important vital cutting edge updates about influencers and reality TV stars whether we want to hear about them or not...
We say we want to win the AI arms race with China, but instead of educating our people about the pros and cons of AI as well as STEM, we know more than we want to know about Kim Kardashian's law degree misadventures and her belief that we faked the moon landing.
It's not that hard to prove that you did the work and not an AI. Show your work. Explain to the teacher why you wrote what you did, why that particular approach to the narrative appealed to you and you chose that as the basis for your work. Show an outline on which the paper was based. Show rough drafts. Explain how you revised the work, where you found your references, and why you retained some sources in the paper and not others.
To wit, show the teacher that YOU did the work and not someone else. If the teacher is not willing to do this with every student they accuse of malfeasance, they need to find another job. They're lazy as hell and suck at teaching.
Computer, show "my" work and explain to the teacher why "I" wrote what "I" did, describe why that particular approach to the narrative appealed to "me" and "I" chose that as the basis of "my" work. Produce an outline on which the paper could have been based and possible rough drafts, then explain how I could have revised the work to produce the final result.
And if you do all of that, and memorize it well enough to have an in-person debate with the teacher over whether or not you did the work, then maybe that's close enough to actually doing the work?
And which continent, country, province, city, or neighborhood are we talking about? The differences between EV and ICE sales is the same (or trending the same) across all of these regions? Certainly claiming that would be a lie.
Exactly. A simple phone that runs a browser I can trust that's also capable of running web-based apps is all I need. I already avoid running apps on my iphone whenever possible.
The phone I really want is as uncomplicated and open as possible and beholden to no corporate economic interests or privacy invasions.
Now that I'm retired I'm looking for a project to immerse myself in. This sounds like just the ticket.
It depends on what definition of "uncomplicated" you'll assume, but that's pretty much how I perceive my Librem 5. It's fairly inspectable and relatively easy to understand as a computing device - no weird stuff like hundreds of disk partitions that you can't touch without risking bricking the phone like on Qualcomm devices, but a fairly regular GNU/Linux installation with well-defined boundaries on what's open and what's not - and it runs web apps pretty well. I have things like my bank, public transit planner, ride-hailing, webmail, RSS reader, Matrix client, package delivery status, even Facebook & Messenger for the handful of people that can still be only reached there - all "installed" as web apps using Epiphany (aka GNOME Web). Some of them required a bit of fiddling to discover which user-agent leads to a usable experience, but the results have been pretty good so far. In case I really need to run some Android app for some reason, I can boot Waydroid up and launch it there, though I use it very rarely. No corporate economic interests, no privacy invasions, no invasive notifications or ads, it simply works the way I want it to work. I just have to be careful with battery usage, but it's manageable :)
I think this is a fair measure of any life -- are there enough positives to offset the negatives? And that includes the cost (and the benefit) of your suicide on others. No one but you should be able to make that call. All that remains then, legally, is to ensure you are well informed about the de/merits of your choice and sane enough to make the call.
Of course, even if you lack legal permission, suicide doesn't strictly _require_ legal or medical assistance. An autonomous exit is always an option, though generally less painless than assisted.
It'd also be a good starting point to be more concrete in your ambitions. What version of C is your preferred starting point, the basis for your "Better C"?
I'd also suggest the name "Dependable C" confuses readers about your objective. You don't seek reliability but a return to C's simpler roots. All the more reason to choose a recognized historical version of C as your baseline and call it something like "Essential C".
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