I work with another tech startup in the parenting/baby space and it's hard to do PR for this space. This is especially true because there aren't may PR/comms people with experiences and contacts that cross parenting and tech and in my experience, people with PR experience in the parenting space often rely on a physical product to promote and send as samples to parenting journalists, tv shows, etc. As a tech company, there's no freebie product to push. And on the tech side, despite the fact that pretty much everyone knows a parent or child, this area is still considered niche which makes it less interesting to tech press than something that appears to be a service that could appeal to anyone.
"“It will form the foundation for future human studies investigating mental experiences occurring in the dying brain, including seeing light during cardiac arrest,” she says."
I am a big fan of science and research - and I think we should always be questioning everything. But I'm curious to know what benefits this research has. I genuinely don't know where this kind of research could lead so I'm not naive enough to suggest it's not a good use of time or resources, but how can this help us improve our lives, health and world? Does it matter? Not to be crass, but are those last vestiges of electrical energy in a dying brain going to be of any use?
A whole lot of seemingly useless science does end up being useful later on in ways we don't imagine. I doubt Mersenne and Fermat envisioned their work being used to secure banking transactions. However, mathematics is typically harmless to animals, so it doesn't really matter if it never ends up being useful. This study was both immediately useless _and_ harmful.
The UofM ethics board must really be a rubber stamp if it approves asphyxiating and shocking to death a bunch of rats just to study near-death experiences.
This reminds of when I read Stiff (an amazing book, by the way) [0], and how scientists in the good old days were weighing bodies before and after death, trying to find a weight of the soul, or any other quantitative values for the soul. I found that funny, but off-putting and disturbing.
My take: people are looking for any proof of the afterlife, holding onto a sliver hope proven by any scientific, factual account. I call the gamble on the afterlife faith, and why it cannot be guaranteed, but hey, that is way out of the scope of this conversation.
If you really take the concept of a soul living in some astral dimension seriously, then performing experiments to try to pinpoint its interface with ordinary matter (the body) makes perfect sense.
If you're not interested in getting experimental evidence for your idea, whatever it might be, it could be that you don't even believe there is any. Maybe you actually think the idea isn't even true in the literal sense.
Demanding that research show immediate practicality is a good way to end up doing no meaningful research whatsoever.
Virtually every major discovery in the past hundred years (if not more) stems from research that had no obvious direct application. The biggest benefit of the post-industrial society is being able to spend time on things that aren't immediately useful, but potentially have greater benefits further down the road.
Keep in mind that "All breakthroughs are derived from basic research" (if true) doesn't entail "All basic research leads to breakthroughs".
We still need to judge the merit of basic research; in this case I'm slightly more skeptical as to its potential to unravel, well, anything about the mind at all.
I agree with you on the need to use judgement. In this case though, while the research might not tell us much about the mind, knowing more about the regions of the brain that are active during an NDE could provide more insight into how the brain is physically affected by oxygen starvation. It might also help with designing physical and psychological therapies for the negative consequences [1] of near death experiences for survivors.
It does seen like a lot of the discussion about this subject is (often implicitly) trying to address a religious/afterlife aspect of nde. For example, the article says 'The "near-death experience" reported by cardiac arrest survivors worldwide may be grounded in science'. The brain is a physical object that is subject to the laws of physics, so that "grounding" is inevitable whether we know how it works or not. This shouldn't be surprising and there isn't an alternative, short of admitting religion or parapsychology.
The major red flag for me in this article was the line "He couldn’t really answer the questions, but I agreed to run a small trial. Based on our results, that marketing consultant is no longer with us." It really colored the rest of the article for me - making me incredibly skeptical of the manager and his instinct, opinions and judgement. It was no surprise then when the reason he was "scammed" was because his checkout process had the form equivalent of a big red call to action saying "leave my site" in the discount code box. I always Google for discount codes when I see those boxes.
If anything, this should be read as an educational piece for consumers about who is really making money when you search for discount codes online, rather than outrage at the affiliate marketing world.
The major red flag for me in this article was the line "He couldn’t really answer the questions, but I agreed to run a small trial. Based on our results, that marketing consultant is no longer with us." It really colored the rest of the article for me - making me incredibly skeptical of the manager and his instinct, opinions and judgement.
That's interesting. Here's an article by someone you don't know and, within the first paragraph, you are "incredibly skeptical". I think most people's normal reaction would be to give the guy the benefit of the doubt - after all, it's the first paragraph and that person knows a lot more details about their business than the first paragraph will give away. I think most of us would read that line in the beginning, file it away for verification/thinking as we read the article, then revisit that after we've been presented much more of the article. For you to color your view so easily and quickly is interesting - it's almost akin to someone walking around "looking for a fight".
But I think that's the point - the traffic is effective the merchant's own. They're not driving spammy visitors or buying false visits; they're just redirecting the customers who would have already been browsing the site back to the checkout funnel - they'd just get the benefit of the affiliate tracking code added to the order.
Interesting - looks like it would pair well with http://www.deskgen.com/ which allows teams to share resources and DNA sequences, sync that to an inventory of existing plasmids, proteins and enzymes and helps teams be more efficient in producing DNA. Love seeing the places biotech is going.
It'd also be really nice if, every time I logged in, I wasn't prompted to tell them if there is "someone special in my life." Really? Is relationship status that critical?
