🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

@Moon

Scihub is good, though far from complete and legality is questionable for sure.

@10grans @akeno @madmike @Coyote @Andrii

@Coyote

Aaron Swartz got in trouble beause he mass downloaded with the intent to redistribute.. If you do data analysis but dont mass download, or if you download only things you intend to read then you should be good.

@10grans @akeno @madmike @Andrii

@Coyote

There are subscriptions to larger collections of journals. They just tend to be a bit more pricey... for that though a public library is your best bet.

@10grans @akeno @madmike @Andrii

@Coyote

I hear ya.. two suggestions.

1) pick just a single high quality journal and pay for the subscription. Some journals arent that expensive 100$ for a whole year or something.

2) go to a library, a good library, especially one at a university, will give you free access to many journal databases.

@10grans @akeno @madmike @Andrii

@Coyote

Yea that explain it.. keep in mind anyone can start a journal and do peer review, not every journal does **good** peer review or quality work... there are junk journals and then there are good journals.. this is why you cant just blindly go "this is peer reviewed therefore its fact". you kinda need to know the quality of the journal it comes from as well as what other studies on the same subject say, and even look at how old a paper is.

But yea.. get access to a journal. you dont need an expensive subscription either.. there are relatively cheap subscriptions if all you want is a single specific journal in digital format. If you get a good journal I think you will appreciate the value they produce.

@10grans @akeno @madmike @Andrii

@Coyote

On that we agree. I 100% support the idea that whether i think your choices are idiotic or not when it comes to your body they are you choices to make. If you get sick or die you are the only one who is going to suffer, so you have the right to choose your own fate.

@denza252

@Coyote

It depends, PhDs accomplish a hell of a lot in theory, they just suck at building the results you'd see.

I code a lot of machine learning stuff.. a HUGE portion of stuff ive implemented that has been extremely powerful was just me taking a PhD paper with some shitty code but a brilliant idea and turning it into a proper library.

Anyone who straddles the line between PhD and engineer and gets the computer science journals like ASIST or ACM will tell you its a constant stream of new, novel and useful (though often specialized) Ideas... yea 75% of it might be stupid stuff that is just interesting, but the other 25% has value.

I get the feeling you either read really shitty journals or dont really read specific journals at all (and just come across random articles that are the exception more than a the rule)... I urge you to go out, get a subscription to a well respected high quality journal in a field you can understand, and actually go through each months or quarters issue and one by one check out the papers.. they tend to all have a lot of value.

@10grans @akeno @madmike @Andrii

@Coyote

If you ever want to see a paper that is behind a paywall and you dont wish to get a subscription just email the author. 98% of the time they will happily send you a free copy of the paper.

@10grans @akeno @madmike

@Coyote

That data is not yet in a form that is particularly compelling. It tells you nothing unless you at a minimum normalize against the background. At a simple glance nothing about that happens to be alarming.

@denza252

@Andrii

No one should assume someone is automatically correct due to letters on their name.. however if those letters come from an accredited university, and one person has them and another doesnt, and both sides assert some fact without actually teaching you what you need to know to prove that fact (perhaps because it is too complicated in the time given).. youd be a fool not to go with the person who has been trained all else being equal.

With that said if someone has some letters after their name and has accomplished nothing past university, and someone else has no letters after their name and has published 20 ground breaking papers on the topic that have been peer reviewed and shown to be correct as well as novel, then by all means you should be trusting the guy with no letters.

In the end when it comes to decided who is a more reliable source on any topic it isnt about the letters on their name but rather how much they have accomplished in their respective field that has been proven to be right by other experts and which demonstrates their abilities.

@10grans @akeno @madmike @Coyote

@Coyote

I mean, science and peer review is way more reliable than just winging it.. but like everything it wont be perfect and you absolutely need to apply judgement and not just take everyting blindly... Its important to understand how strongly a papers conclusion is shown, what biases the author has, and how many other studies done in different ways show similar results. From that you form a picture.

The problem is sometimes with just a fraudulent paper but thats the exception far more than it is the rule. More often its simply that a paper shows weak but supporting evidence for something, doesnt make any false claims and even clearly points out how weak the evidence is, but because the media doesnt know the first thing about reading or understanding science, and neither does the general public, you get some bullshit interpretation of the paper sounding like settled science on an issue that is still very much still being researched.

@10grans @akeno @madmike

@Coyote

You can almost never draw causation when it comes to medications and single cases. We just dont have the means. We do it with statistical correlation and that means looking at large groups of people.

Ideally what should happen, and what usually does happen. Is her hospital visit is flagged when it is seen it happened right after a vaccine and is added to the FDA database of all people who had serious medical issues with a potential but unknown link to the virus. Then if enough people show the same problems, enough that it is higher than the background rate, then they will usually look into it more deeply and look at better data and do better studies and either pull the vaccine or add it as a warning and a side effect.

Thats exactly how it went down with AZ, blood clots were seen to be happening at a higher rate than usual, was concluded it was due to the AZ vaccine,a nd it was added as a warning to the drug and some countries adjusted their approach to administering it as a result.

One person will never tell you anything useful though.

@denza252

@akeno

LOLOLOLOL

You: "Here listen to this guy who got a PhD in 8 months from a guy in a trench coat in a back ally talk about how viruses arent real".

Me: "That dude isnt a Phd"

You: "Barghblahdf youa re a fraud, a Scientologist, you dont know what your talking about. How dare you insult a real doctor who knew what he was talking about"...

LOL ok there buddy. you lost the high ground the second you tried to sell a college drop out who only got in on a scholarship playing tennis as a reliable source in the first place. Sorry but your opinion of me has 0 value.

@Coyote @madmike

@Coyote

I have no way of knowing or saying if the woman is faking or telling the truth. Based ont he placement of the electrodes on her head I would say it looks legit as that does appear to be the proper placement for the electrodes.

With that said hundreds of thousands of people get anurisms every day. Start giving out a vaccine it is inevitable someone somewhere is going to have an annurism the same day as the vaccine. So in and of itself this isnt evidence that there is any connection to the vaccine, its just evidence that the world is a big place.

That said there **is** some legitimate risk of blood clot from the AZ vaccine. It isnt enough for most countries to pull the vaccine but its enough for germany to say it is no longer approved for people who arent at high risk of death from COVID, so it is a real concern. That said I havent heard anything of J&J being associated to blood clots, which could cause an aneurysm potentially. So it is at least possible that J&J vaccine caused this, but even if it did that doesnt neccesarly mean the vaccine is bad, if it is a side effect and the side effect is extremely rare it may be a reasonable risk for most people.

In the end the answer is... right now we dont have any evidence to think the J&J vaccine caused it, but its always possible, but if it turns out to be the case its likely to be extremely rare.

@denza252

@Coyote

Right, I didnt explain the full process, and your right right its rather involved and ultimately requires a few clever steps... but my point is when these anti-germ theory nincompoops come around they always talk about isolation.. in their mind they have this simplistic idea of a vial that has just the virus in it and noting else.. which as you probably know just makes no educated sense of any kind.

The processes you describe (and the details you didnt) all take place in a liquid soup that has a very high concentration of the virus but it isnt absolute pure (it doesnt need to be and that is impractical).. despite not being abolutely pure we can still "isolate" it in the sense of reading its dna and protein and identifying it.

@akeno @vandys @madmike @Moon

@denza252

They werent banned here, they just were no longer approved for treatment of covid. Moreover since doctors were using it to try to treat covd without positive effect it caused a shortage and thus can be hard to get world wide for treatment of malaria now.

But no its not banned for treating malaria, but it is no longer approved for treating COVID.

@Coyote

@vandys

It has been isolated but you need to be specific onw hat you truely mean by isolated.. If you truly mean that the virus is the only thing and no plasma, water, or anything else is present, then that would be literally impossible and unnecesary.. if by isolated you mean no other cell organels or significant structures present in the sample such then yes of course it has been.

The point isolation is a completely nonsensical term that has nothing to do with if we can identify if it is there.

If I put a chunk of gold ont he table no matter how pure i try to make it wont be absolutely pure, there will be 0.001% of other stuff, plus the air in the room, plus the oils on its surface.. but you'd be a fool to claim gold doesnt exist simply because you cant make a 100% pure sample of it.

Just as with gold we can isolate viruses more than adequately to identify them.

@Moon @akeno @madmike @Coyote

@Coyote

I agree, but my point is, if you do exagerate you likely wont get anyone to look in the first place, they will just dismiss you.. A more balanced approach means people might take the time to stop and look at what your saying at all (though many still wont).

@10grans @akeno @madmike

@Coyote

you probably cant have a rational conversation with karen either way.. but you stand a much more reasonable chance of getting a karen to consider your POV if you sell a reasonable middle ground that takes the truthful elements of both sides rather than exaggerating too far in the opposite direction which will just result in you being dismissed for absurdity not just by the karens, but by the few objective people who are walking the middle road.

@10grans @akeno @madmike

@Coyote

Thats all fine. The only problem with comparing it to a flu is that it gives the impression that COVID is not particularly novel and serious.. it is serious, just not to the levels of exageration the media makes you think but it is serious. So I think comparing it to the flu maybe be exagerating it too far in the other direction and making it sound far more benign than it really is, which has just as many dangers as trying to play it off as worse than it is.

@10grans @akeno @madmike