I've been waiting for stem cell therapy to regrow my recessed gums. Every option for taking care of my recessed gums seem horrible and my gums are so far gone. Wish I'd have developed better habits for taking care of them when I was younger but oh well.
That's always easier said than done, isn't it? I'm sure many of us wish they had taken better care of their bodies when they were younger, but sometimes life gets in the way, long term impacts are unclear, and we overestimate our ability to "fix it later".
It's also important to not underestimate just how powerful lifestyle changes can be even in the face of (a lot of our potential) dire outcomes. Not sure about gums here specifically.
Reversing a condition once you have it is an order of magnitude more difficult to fix than to prevent, but if you're in luck and able to do so, every day now has the potential for taking a step in the right direction.
My favorite example of this is post-menopausal women regaining bone density, muscle mass, balance, mood etc. to rival women half their age in a matter of a few weeks (weight training). The same can be said for pre-diabetes, early T2, high blood pressure, addictions... the list goes on.
With regards to OP, I hope you find some relief somehow! I still have some baby teeth with very short roots; the second I get inflamed gums my pain level approaches levels were I can't function properly. What is the symptoms of receded gums?
> It's also important to not underestimate just how powerful lifestyle changes can be
Agreed, what's that phrase, "The best time to start was 20 years ago, the second best time is now"?
But it's also important to be a little kind to yourself, don't be too harsh on yourself for the things you didn't do or could have done differently. You can't go back in time.
From your own mouth or from cadavers? Cadavers sounds freaky to me, from my own mouth seems like I'm just robbing Peter to pay Paul, but maybe it's worth it.
It was from the roof of my own mouth. Except for a bit of bleeding I had no complications whatsoever as it's just connective tissue that's taken. It regrows quite fast.
Out of curiosity, what habits would you adopt? Flossing? Or is there something else doctors recommend? A cursory search seems to bring up rather regular dental hygiene.
I had all the habits, I just wasn't prioritizing them if I was tired or sleeping late due to school/work/stuff. I probably should have prioritized set times to do them each day irregardless of what I was doing. Plus, I didn't take seriously the habit to brush for several minutes instead of several seconds.
Not the OP, but on top of cleaning the gaps between teeth well, I started going to dental hygienist four times a year and the expense seems to be worth it.
Nowadays my gums just don't bleed ever, period, even when the hygienist is scrapping away calculus.
The wording is awkward and suboptimal. If you don't know what AWS SES is, you'd easily get the wrong impression. In fact, I'd even say it's factually incorrect. It's not built on top of AWS SES. It's built to utilize AWS SES for its functionality. Slightly different, pedantic really.
Given there are thousands of papers written on this over the past half century due to the complexity of human behaviour, I'm not sure you'd be able to fit this into one paper. There are too many topics to discuss. Individual side, organizational side, and then it spiders from there. Cognition and psychology, culture, corporate governance, and much more, it's endless.
But to be simplistic, you could just count the co-authors on all those thousands of papers, take the average, and there's your answer. Draw up histograms along various independent variables if you want a bit more nuance.
Sure, but code has a level of complexity that boxes and lines abstract away. If you want to describe a certain level of complexity, you'll need code or something that achieves a similar level of capability. If you don't need that high level of complexity, often because you're abstracting complexity away, it's hard to find an alternative that isn't better than boxes and lines. If there's a better alternative, nobody's found it yet. Boxes and lines appear to be a final state to which all roads lead.
For what it's worth, MDPI has a lot of criticisms from academia as a publisher. Criticisms regarding editorial reliability, methodology acceptance, rigour, etc, etc. Here's just a smattering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controvers...
It's been enough where I end up automatically ignoring MDPI papers unless someone I respect recommends one to me. For better or worse. But MDPI made it's own bed in many ways.
I've heard this and actually had a paper published in an MDPI journal. My personal experience was that it was astonishing quick to do so. Usually the submission/review/acceptance/publishing process is many months but this was less than two if I remember correctly. The paper was reviewed and the reviewer comments were reasonable. Not just editorial but with technical comments. So that seemed fine. As soon as we submitted the revised manuscript it was pretty much published immediately. So all the normal steps were followed, just at a faster rate it seemed.
Again, this is my one and only experience with them. I'd be interested if others have any...
those criticisms are from people who think that publishers and reviewers should evaluate scientific papers, when obviously the right way to evaluate papers is by the larger research community over the course of many years. worse, many of the criticisms are from institutions that are attempting to use bibliometrics for hiring and tenure decisions, which is an obviously stupid idea
most papers are worthless, but when they are first written, it is too early to tell which ones they are; of course reviewers' suggestions are often helpful in improving the quality of a paper, but they cannot improve a worthless paper into a groundbreaking one
pre-publication peer review was instituted mostly in the mid-twentieth century and should be regarded as a failed experiment belonging to the age of paper. most peer-reviewed papers are worthless, and peer review often serves merely to retard progress
most of the papers i see on mdpi are mediocre, but some are useful, and it certainly isn't vixra-style garbage
Peer review is great in theory, but fails because it makes too many assumptions and because the incentive structure. And it certainly doesn't scale well. It's important to remember that the point of publishing is communication. Anything more or less is ill founded.
It is obtuse to think that a few people can read a paper and know it's validity. It's falsifiable but even that's fuzzy. The problem then comes down to the incentive structures. Why do people cheat? Because we're lazy evaluators. It's odd to me that we won't read the works of peers in a department, lab, whatever. But doing that would be a much stronger form of evaluation than anything that could be inferred from citations, h-index, conference ranking, etc. Plus, the structure is to push novelty fast and frequently. That's not only not possible but ignores a fundamental aspect of science: reproducibility.
But this also doesn't mean there aren't scam publishers and publishers scammers prefer. But I'd say that those are a result of the former issue. Because metrics are not being treated as guides. It's just Goodhart's Law in action.
i don't think mdpi is a scam publisher, but then, i don't read mdpi papers from following some kind of latest-mdpi-papers feed; i read them because other papers cite them, so i couldn't tell you if the utter-bullshit-paper percentage on mdpi is 1% or 99%
i just know i heave a sigh of relief when the paper i'm looking for turns out to be on mdpi, because i know that not only will i be able to read it without hassle, it will have a clearly marked creative-commons license that permits me to archive and redistribute the paper. same with hindawi actually, though i'm mmaybe a bit prejudiced against hindawi papers
Yeah I can't say anything about MDPI, and this isn't in my domain. My domain is in ML and all I can say there is that the signal to noise ratio over conference publications and arxiv papers is within error. But research continues for the same reasons it always has, because people are communicating and niches know their niches. But I think it doesn't bode well for Academia or even industry, who are letting the metrics dictate how they evaluate people. Especially for industry, where things have to end up working. I think Gemini is doing a great job at showing how being great on benchmarks doesn't mean you're a great tool. It's because benchmarks are only guides. When they aren't, they will be hacked (if they already aren't). And that's a dangerous situation to be in.
here are some mdpi papers i have in my bookmarks file; all of these seemed pretty decent, if i recall correctly
http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/8/622/htm a 2016 #paper on #solar #energy payback times and EROEI (“EROI”) and life-cycle analysis (LCA) and net energy analysis (NEA). In particular fixed ground-mounted “multicrystalline” silicon #photovoltaic cells have EPBT of 0.9 to 2.1 years depending on irradiation (insolation), and an EROEI of 15 to 35. This is surprising because that’s pretty much what it was when NREL published an EPBT analysis around 2001 or so.
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/2/1/1/htm “#Energy Inputs in #Food Crop Production in Developing and Developed Nations,” Pimentel’s #EROEI #paper where he found about four joules returned per joule spent on industrialized #agriculture, #CC-BY, Energies 2009, 2(1), 1-24; https://doi.org/10.3390/en20100001
https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/2/438 Elfring, Torta, and van de Molengraft’s more comprehensive #particle-filters #tutorial #paper (with #PDF) which supposedly has example code that I can’t find. This is recent (02021) and open-access (#CC BY, I think), and many pages long, and has an overview of a lot of the motivation, but in some sense not very approachable.
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/12/2/220 #CC #paper describes various excavation methods (plasma, foam injection, etc.) including #expanding-grout, which it says works by hydrating lime under confinement and also producing ettringite, but lists four different types: type K (4CaO·3Al₂O₃·SO₃ + 8CaSO₄⋅H₂O + 6Ca(OH)₂ + 74H₂0 → 3(3CaO⋅Al₂O₃⋅3 CaSO₄⋅32H₂O, can be enhanced with silica fume and plasticizer), type M (CaO⋅Al₂O₃ + 3CaSO₄⋅H₂O + 2Ca(OH)₂ + 24H₂O → 3CaO⋅Al₂O₃⋅3CaSO₄⋅32H₂O), type S (3CaO⋅Al₂O₃ + 3CaSO₄⋅H₂O + 26H₂O → 3CaO⋅Al₂O₃⋅3CaSO₄⋅32H₂O), and class [sic] G (CaO + H₂O → Ca(OH)₂). Calls it “SCDA” and mentions ASTM C 845 “Standard Specification for Expansive Hydraulic Cement”. It says they work too slowly (12h) to replace explosives in the usual mining cycle, but I suspect that’s not true of class G, where the main problem is keeping it from reacting to completion before you can pour it into the hole.
some do take that form, yes; others are simply complaints that tenure and hiring boards were going to have to evaluate the quality of candidates' research for themselves because mdpi wasn't doing it for them
... and plenty of ethical problems in terms of the very business model of Science, Nature, Elsevier and all that. Not to mention what they've done to maintain their comfortable position.
MDPI is the most active RSS feed by far in my collection, they publish a lot of stuff. I'd be interested in getting feeds of Open Access papers on other journals (say from Science) but so far no dice.
I'm not an expert on this stuff at all, so assume I'm stupid and ignorant when I write the following. As I understand it, HIV has actually been useful to develop a delivery mechanism for some therapies that have excellent potential. Would this kind of vaccine cause such therapies to become ineffective?
No: because the target of vaccines is viral protein coats to prompt antibody binding. The usefulness of HIV for other applications is that some of it's proteins - i.e. the reverse transcriptase - are extremely useful molecular engineering tools, but they're used as individual components.
One of the interesting failed COVID vaccine efforts was by the University Of Queensland in Australia which was working on a novel protein based vaccine where the idea was a conformationally locked COVID spike protein was injected[1] - basically it presents the protein as it's found on the surface of the virus, which in turn promotes an antibody response which is "accurate" - whereas free-floating proteins, i.e. if you just shredded up the virus - don't look the same.
The problem? The technology was based on a protein sequence called gp41 - which is a subunit of the HIV spike protein. It's not HIV, it's not derived from actual HIV virus - it's made in labs from separately cloned sequences...but unfortunately, part of the immune response to the vaccine generated HIV binding antibodies, similar enough to "real" HIV binding antibodies that they would trip false-positives in HIV tests - i.e. you would test positive to HIV for months, but you didn't actually have HIV - you had antibodies which had enough activity to the common HIV test assay that it looked like you did (e.g. a PCR test for HIV would show you don't have it. But it's impractical to have a whole lot of people who look indistinguishable to the HIV positive population when we had other vaccine options).
When we were purchasing a clothes washer and dryer, Samsung had a special promotion. The sales rep at the store told us that the Samsung machines got the most complaints and she would recommend the LG machines. But we wanted that promotion, it was oh so nice. We bought a 5-year warranty just in case.
Sure enough, it's year 3 and the washer has stopped working. Repair guy came and decided he needs to order new parts to fix it. It's been a week or so without doing any laundry. Glad we purchased the extra warranty, but maybe we should have gone with the LG like the sales lady recommended.
Without knowing anything particular about Miele, all this anecdote suggests is that they were great thirty years ago. They could well have enshittified between now and then.
I'm at the point where I don't trust any brands at all anymore. The next time I need to make a major appliance purchase I'll buy a subscription to Consumer Reports and blindly follow their recommendation - I still trust them.
But isnt that the crux of the matter? You buy what consumer reports say, and the reviewers have no way of knowing if it will break down in 3 years. No one rates their gadget after three years so we have a massive blind spot where the best thing is still word of mouth.
My parents bought an Miele washing machine, rock solid even after pushing ten years.
Yeah, totally. That's where branding used to be a valuable signal, under the assumption that a company wouldn't deliberately choose to destroy their long-term value. I don't believe that anymore, so I'll place what remains of my trust in reviewers I know are independent (God help us all if it turns out CR is taking kick-backs or something) and figure know more about, say, washing machines than I do.
Apparently Miele has started to have quality issues. But they still might be a good bet, if only for the fact that they are (probably?) the last family run business in the market.
I did not know that! Thanks. Indeed, "family run", depending on where they are in the internal-to-the-family management-transition cycle, is more encouraging to me than "publicly held". ("Private equity" is always and everywhere a huge red flag.)
It's depressing to me that we have to think about those things. I mean, "buyer beware" has always been the case, but it seems like we have to be more wary (or more wary of more factors) than we did a decade or two ago. Or maybe I'm just getting older. I dunno.
"Capitalism" is very much in the eye of the beholder, and different regulatory models create market economies with different incentives. What you're talking about is "normal" in certain places.
I didn't mean that, though, and I don't think it's what the other people in this thread did, either. I was thinking of the practice whereby private equity funds purchase companies and exploit the "brand equity" they've built up over the long term, whilst deliberately enshittifying them, in order to make a short-term profit for the new owners. That's been normalized, in some places, but I wish it were not, and would prefer that financial markets be regulated in ways that make it un-profitable.
What is fascinating to me about technical people is the particular subculture that sincerely believes that technology will solve the people problem. I recently got into a long thread argument with someone on HN about this. The person was adamant that people problems can NOW finally be solved by designing technology to be able to handle adversarial and incompetent actors. But the problems that such software tries to solve are tightly defined in scope and cannot deal with actually messed up people or organizational problems. Unless engineers are willing to acknowledge people problems, they will keep banging their heads against the door when the organization isn't doing what it's supposed to do.
But it's far easier to acknowledge the people problem first and see if there is a solution for that, rather than trying to ram technological solutions through a people-shaped hole. And if the people problem can't be solved (i.e., it will often involve a change in culture and leadership style, or else a change in leadership, both of which are difficult), it may be best to give up anyway and wash one's hands of the whole mess. In which case, one just sits there going through the motions to pass the day and collect the pay. If they're motivated, they'll find another job, rather than try to fix the mess, and they'll likely be happier doing that too. This is also why it takes a certain non-technical skillset combined with technical skills to succeed in leadership roles. It's a completely different game to play.
I was watching some interview long ago when the guest hit it square on the head. My guess is that it was Joel Spolsky, but only because no other names come to mind as being plausible.
Essentially the rant goes: So all of these people who were not particularly good at people skills in high school go into a career where they think people skills won't matter as much, and check out for 4 years while their fellow classmates are honing their interpersonal skills in one of the most intense personal growth periods of a young adult's life.
Then they graduate, get out into the world and realize that it is all people problems, and now they're even further behind their peers than when they went into college.
Being friendly, honest, and learning when to keep your mouth shut (biggest mistake when I had engineers chat with customers) is more than enough to keep everyone happy.
Honestly, I think finding a non-software project to volunteer on is a good start. About half of my better acquaintances are landscapers because that's what one of my hobbies attracts.
Also turns out they don't really like tech for tech's sake. Who knew!
Tech is still a pretty good option though. Having poor people skills but good tech skills means being a not-too-senior IC forever, a job with decent pay and hours relative to other career options.
I actually belive that a lot of the world's hard problems have been, in many ways, made worse by this attitude. Fb being so slow and reluctant to acknowledge their pivotal role in polarizing the world for instance.
To be honest this is what I usually see, not what GP describes. I've never worked with anyone who was ignorant of the people problems around them. Interns, maybe.
I would argue that all of the ideology-based advocacy for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is/was advocating to solve a people problem with technology.
It's more along the lines of "most world governments are actively sabotaging their own citizens. This happens for various reasons, from corruption, to dictatorial panic, ... and Bitcoin provides payment while avoiding to deal with them"
Of course that probably is not the concern Swiss banks have on Bitcoin, but it's still what they offer.
> But the problems that such software tries to solve are tightly defined in scope and cannot deal with actually messed up people or organizational problems.
In many cases the solution comes in the form of "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script."
For example, suppose that you have regulator captured by construction companies who want construction to be labor-intensive because they're the ones who get the money. The problem here is not that we need technology to reduce construction costs, it's that construction costs are being artificially inflated by regulators.
But now you come up with a technology that allows construction to be performed in a factory and the local part is limited to taking the thing off the truck and putting it in the building, which takes ten seconds and can be done by the truck driver. Can this solve the problem?
Maybe. It depends on whether the incumbents have enough political power to have it banned or made prohibitively expensive. If they do then it won't work. But if they don't, the technology solves the people problem, by removing the problematic people from the operation. Or forcing them to improve their own efficiency so they can remain competitive with the new technology.
