Posts by Dylan Mordaunt
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Hard News: An unhelpful column about cannabis, in reply to Simon Armstrong,
Lol, not sure how to edit- wrote on my phone.
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Hi all,
NZMA does not represent the entire community of medical practitioners in NZ. This is a recurrent issue with the organisation recurrently misrepresenting it's membership. To quote a colleague recently:
"My understanding is that up to 3000 NZMA members are students as they get free membership when they join the NZMSA which about 70-90% of students do for the full 5 years. If this is true that’s half the NZMA membership hence the view that they are ‘representative’ of the medical profession is grossly misleading. This is especially true when most of us preferentially belong to our RACP and Society speciality groups."
This means NZMA's views on Cannibals, EOLC, TOP, are NOT representative of the community. Similarly, NZMJ is part of NZMA.
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There's a limerick in there but I'm just not talented enough to find it
Bart, here's my effort:
We want puppies and rainbows and chocolate and poetry
We want men in muscle shirts- no weeners like pete doherty,
They'd be sensitive and caring,
They'd be romantic and sharing,
Oh where, oh where is this man for me?
It's left wanting I'm afraid; perhaps the Haiku?
puppies and rainbows
chocolate and poetry
winter is over! -
The other point is that NIWA are public servants. We pay for their work. So they are the ones beholden to us to justify their research.
Therefore, shouldn't the methodology be easily obtained through an OIA request?
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Giovanni, I think David might be referring to an unpublished paper available from the author's website (due to be published by Atmospheric Science Letters):
The author's provide some background here:http://rossmckitrick.weebly.com/index.html
David, to be honest, it seems like a bit of a waste of time posting about an article like that here- making absolutist claims on the basis of an, as yet, unpublished paper. A paper which the authors themselves have pointed out, has been difficult to find a journal which will publish it. Being a peer-reviewed article doesn't assure that their science is correct either, it simply allows the ideas to be tested in an open forum and to be disputed, disproven, elaborated, or improved upon. -
Not sure whether this is relevant, but these recent examples of photo-bending in the international media might be of interest:
I've found it interesting that despite the abundance of digital cameras and digital photo-sharing resources, and unlike candid home-videos of certain events (e.g. 9/11) very few amateur photos seem to make it to the news media.
Another collection of photos which is pretty impressive is the Life Magazine archive- http://images.google.com/hosted/life. There are quite a few NZ ones obscured from search by mispellings such as 'New Zeland'. I think this one might be Takapuna Beach?
I don't have an iOS device, but I've been enjoying the herald's travel photos recently- this one on the weekend is a nice example ... I've always thought stuff.co.nz's travel articles would be some much more enjoyable with more than their miserly inclusions- e.g. -
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Giovanni, I'm not sure either- I think the terms are sometimes used interchangeably in the press, and I can't find anything which says their deaths were definitively attributed to anything- perhaps the local privacy laws prohibit this?
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As regards blood doping, asides from the whole 'cheating' perspective, there have been allegations since the 70's that the deaths of many international athletes, particularly cyclists, can be attributed to either autologous transfusions or synthetic erythropoeitin (EPO).
Between 1987, when EPO became available in Europe, and 1990, 18 Dutch and Belgian cyclists died suddenly, many unofficially (as far as I can tell) attributed to blood doping. It may be that with more modern autopsy techniques that we find that many of these deaths were for other reasons, particularly since high-level athletes are a risk for sudden unexplained death.
The belief is that these techniques increase the risk of clotting (thrombosis). There is good rationale for caution, and there is some evidence to suggest increased clotting in athletes whom have blood-doped.
However, the rules do not just restrict blood-doping per se, as the formal limit of haematocrit (the proportion of whole blood which is occupied by red blood cells) of 50% in men and 47% in women effectively restricts the 'too-aggressive' use of any of the 'EPO-stimulating' techniques such as altitude training, hypoxic machines ('hypoxicators'), and altitude tents. WADA also banned the use of any intravenous transfusion in 2006, and considered specifically banning altitude tents.
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Janelle Monáe's Tightrope via Bradford Cox