Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
Why not?
God's purpose
- Thread starter Thor 2
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Why not?
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
My understanding is that it's a constellation of things, none of which are actually a higher prevalence of the disorder. A very large part of it is due to a reclassification of certain symptom clusters as being autism spectrum disorders where they used to be generalized mental retardation. Part of it is due to a refinement of the diagnosis criteria. Part of it is due to an extended definition that includes the spectrum element, and picks up Asperger's as well as a couple of others.
Finally, part of it is also due to increased awareness. The more people who know about it, the more you see parents suspecting that their child has an autism spectrum disorder, and taking them to be diagnosed. Without that effort at awareness, a large number of high-functioning Autism spectrum disorders would never have been suspected, and would never have been diagnosed. They just would have been "quirky" or "weird" kids who turned in to eccentric adults.
I give it a 95% chance that if I were to go in and be evaluated, I would come out with a diagnosis that places me on the autism spectrum. So would my mom, my grandpa, and my nephew. My cousin has actually been diagnosed with Asperger's... and while he's a bit more extreme than the rest of us, he's not actually any different in behavior than we are. We all see the same symptoms in ourselves. But none of us have difficulty functioning, we're all just fine with the fact that we're a little weird, don't really do social things much, have difficulty relating to "normal" people, and prefer solitude. A bunch of other little symptoms as well, but still.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
In former times, kids would be classified as "slow" or "dull" or any number of other derogatory terms.
Why some find it odd that such afflictions are placed on the autistic spectrum now seems not just strange but strangely and unnecessarily cruel.
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Thor 2
Philosopher
And of course the anti vaxers pick up on this apparent explosion in autism numbers in support of their flimsy arguments.
Just nudging back to the OP one has to wonder about God's purpose in creating the vast array of afflictions we, and the rest of the animal kingdom, suffer.
There is a episode in Mr Deity on the subject where Mr Deity claims he needs all these things so that it's not too easy for people to believe in him. I suppose if all things were rosy all the time, folk would have to conclude some entity is making it so.
One thing that bugs me at the moment is the itch. Why do we have them? Can't seem to find a good explanation for it so far.
When on my bike ride in the mornings these days, March flies attack me sometimes and they always manage to get me on that part of the back I can't reach to scratch.
Thor 2
Philosopher
Well if you scratch an itch and it becomes infected you may experience pain but I don't know of any situation where an itch will become pain otherwise. But I am open to suggestions from others.
We have a TV personality, a scientist called Karl Kruszelnicki, (otherwise known as Dr Karl), who claims that no one know of any benefits from having itches.
You're looking at this through your theistic glasses Jodie. Because we have itches the designer must have had a reason to give them to us.
Donn
Philosopher
Yeah, this is a good point. There's probably no reason at all other than stuff happens after other stuff over time and we feel itches.*
We humes are always ready with a just-so story for everything. It ain't necessarily so. Teleology is a boon and a curse.
(* I hate 'em too! Make a back-scratcher from something, but don't press hard!)
Do be careful about what you read as "research" and "papers".
For example - in fundamental core science (by which I mean mainstream physics, chemistry, most of biology, and most fields of Maths that are directly related to research in science (and that's most of Maths, one way or another), and various related fields such as a astronomy, genetics, crystallography...), the research journals are not normally available for public reading ... those are the journals where all the most authoritative research papers are collected, but there is no public demand to see or read any of the millions of papers published there.
Occasionally there will be a paper published on some issue that is regarded as particularly newsworthy or "sensational" to the public in general, and that particular paper (amongst tens of thousands that year) may be made widely available to the public on-line. An obvious example is the C14 paper on dating the Turn Shroud. But 99.99...% of real science research papers are never seen at all by anyone except scientists in each specific field of research.
Also be extremely careful about what is, or is not, a real research journal (publishing real science research papers). To take the Turin Shroud again as an example (since there is a thread here which has been running for years with absolutely absurd claims of hundreds of "papers" being published to show the shroud is genuine, duh!) - Christian shroud groups, of which there are many, have created their own "journals" and invited themselves to submit their own "papers" which they then publish themselves so that it looks to the uninitiated as if these are real independent science papers in real journals ... but of course they are not genuine at all ... in fact they are blatant unashamed deliberate frauds exploiting the gullibility of the Christian faithful (and the internet is of course packed with stuff like that).
Finally - what is published in a medical journal or in a journal in fields such as psychology, whilst it may be genuine science of a sort, is not remotely comparable with papers published by theoretical physicists in Phys. Rev. (or chemists publishing in JACS or J.Chem.Soc. etc.).
One of the good things about modern consumer book publishing, is that over the last 25 years or so, there has been a public demand for real scientists to write real science books describing current research and/or explaining important scientific discoveries in layman's terms. E.g. with authors like Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time), Steven Weinberg (the First Three Minutes), Jerry Coyne (Why Evolution is True), Life Ascending (Nick Lane), The Origin of Our Species (Chris Stringer), From Eternity to Here (Sean Carroll) ... those are all fairly easily readable by a non-scientific audience ... there are of course many other such "popular level (?really?)" books that are extremely "hard going" even for people like me who have worked for many years at post. doc. level in mathematical physics (though I should add/admit that for the last 15 years I have mainly taught music instead), e.g. Roger Penrose "The Road to Reality", or Tony Zee "Quantum Filed Theory in a Nutshell" (though the latter is really a postgrad textbook).
Pup
Philosopher
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Out of curiosity, I tried to see how far one could get without a subscription, and it looks like abstracts are the best one can get.
Primordial Black Hole Scenario for the Gravitational-Wave Event GW150914 Misao Sasaki, Teruaki Suyama, Takahiro Tanaka, and Shuichiro Yokoyama
Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 061101 – Published 2 August 2016
Are those the kinds of papers that you're talking about, or is there a level where things are unavailable beyond even that, and even titles and abstracts are hidden from the public?
And as for the medical papers that are on a lower tier than what theoretical physicists are doing, is this a good example (also available with a free abstract only)?
Conditions for fear
Fiona Carr
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16, 576–577 (2015) doi:10.1038/nrn4030
Published online 09 September 2015
State-dependent memories are those that are most successfully retrieved when conditions at the time of recall are the same as they were at encoding, but the mechanisms that lead to state-dependent learning are not known. Jovasevic et al. now show that activation of extrasynaptic GABA type A receptors (GABAARs) in…
David Mo
Philosopher
Are you saying that this is the required level to participate in this forum?
I should say straight away that I have never tried looking at medical papers, or any papers outside of the field where I was doing research in a fairly narrow area which crossed over between solid state theoretical chemistry and solid sate theoretical physics (particle dynamics in crystals), and that involved all the chemistry journals and most of the main physics journals.
I don't think there is any deliberate attempt to keep any journals, papers, or information away from anyone in the public. It's just that the vast mass of the public are not interested in reading science research papers.
And also there is a security issue. E.g., when I was using the Science Reference Library (which at that time was in Holborn, London ... but may now have moved to be part of the British Library) and the Royal Society of Chemistry library in Piccadilly (again in central London), you had to have a pass showing your academic accreditation to get past the front door. In the Sci. Ref. library you'd see a wider cross-section of people; mostly research scientists and post doc. students, but also engineers & inventors looking at Patent Applications, and even lawyers from the nearby "Inn's of Court" trying to check some aspect of science relative to their legal cases. In the Chem Soc. library, I only ever saw people who seemed to be chemistry researchers and lecturers (the same faces were there on a regular basis).
There is also a fair degree of variation in the quality standards that different journals adhere to. That is - some journals have a lower standard where it's fairly easy to get quite basic work published, whereas the top journals usually only accept the most important research, and that often means work published by the more famous scientists. In my group, if we had a piece of work that we regarded as particularly good then we'd submit it to one of the top journals such as Phys. Rev., or for a shorter quite brief paper maybe Phys. Rev. Lett. On the other hand if we wanted to quickly publish something that was only of more minor interest, then we'd submit to a simpler journal such as Chem Commun. (that's for short "communications").
The journal "Nature" which is very widely known, is afaik intended to cover a very broad field with papers of all sorts from quite important work to much lesser & even possibly quite "dubious" stuff. Some Russian chemistry journals also seemed to include a lot of papers where the results were highly dubious and could not be replicated. So there is a pretty wide range of quality from the most prestigious journals down to the least prestigious.
Beelzebuddy
Penultimate Amazing
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If it's a recent physics paper, it or a draft version will be on arxiv.
If it's a biology or medical paper, it should be on pubmed. If it was funded (even partially) with NIH or NSF money it should be freely available. It's an issue at present, with publishing companies pulling all kinds of chicancery to avoid it.
In either case, if you can't get a paper you want you should email the author. Odds are they'll be overjoyed that someone is taking an interest in their work.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
I don't even think it's lack of interest. I think the majority of it is lack of requisite knowledge to be able to comprehend those papers.
I'm curious and interested in a ton of stuff, from astrophysics to biology, genetics to cognitive psychology. But I'm uneducated on those topics. Heck, even though I'm fairly well-educated when it comes to mathematics, it's been so long since I've applied that knowledge that I have difficulty following along any technical discussions of it. I might very well *want* to read scientific research papers published in peer-reviewed journals... but I am *unable* to effectively comprehend them.
Scientific papers are published for other scientists in that area who already know the terms, jargon, and basic elements of that field. They're not written for laypeople.
Yes, that's true - many science papers will be pretty incomprehensible for non-specialists to read (even for other scientists in a slightly different area of research).
One reason that happens is that when you submit a paper to any journal, you will get a set a guidelines explaining what format and what style the journal wants. And that invariably excludes anything more than very minimal explanation of stuff for which you can just provide a reference to the original paper. So although a paper might need to begin with some mention of previous work, it generally won't explain that, instead it will just make a very brief statement about it and refer you to the earlier publications.
That can be especially difficult if you find your own work crossing over into much more mathematical stuff, where you need to read papers with a lot of maths in them, and where the papers just begin by writing down all sorts of key equations with little or no explanation, and where you're just expected to be automatically familiar with why those particular equations are being used and where they come from. The idea is that if you need any explanation of that sort then you either need to look at the standard text books in the field, or else go back to the original papers where the expressions were first derived.
Jodie
Philosopher
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Thanks Ian, I do have access through the university where I work but honestly don't have time to pull anything other than journals specific to nurse-midwifery and obstetrics. I might be able to understand the medical jargon but not the math involved in very detailed neuro research.
What I was referring to was what is commonly available on Google scholar, NIH, etc... about the process of how our senses create data to build up what we see and experience, associative memories are just one element involved.
What I was referring to was what is commonly available on Google scholar, NIH, etc... about the process of how our senses create data to build up what we see and experience, associative memories are just one element involved.
Thor 2
Philosopher
Thanks Donn. Can't seem to get a comeback from Jodie on this one though.
Good, glad to hear that you have access to medical journals at the Univ. library, and well done for making use of them. I mean that ... it was a genuine thumbs up.
Jodie
Philosopher
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Sorry Thor, I missed whatever you were talking about, what was the question/point you were referring too?
Oh I see, about the itching. It does serve as a protective factor but sometimes it's overkill like when you have hives or some other type of chronic itching that you might get with psoriasis or eczema. In the case of bug bites, it's a side effect of the histamines released in your skin.
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Thor 2
Philosopher