> This has been my impression. I briefly used an Abbott Lingo to help me understand some health issues I was experiencing.
> This article is equivalent to calling the Boeing 737 unsafe because it's had the most Full Lost Events while completely ignoring it's flown 238.84M flights (which is basically more than the entire rest of the list combined).
It sounds like you aren't actually diabetic but feel comfortable explaining how people experience using the equipment they use to manage their disease?
Imagine: "Ugh, Linux sucks and the one time a webpage timed out and it said it was running GNU/Linux, I knew that Linux could never work on my desktop."
It depends on what the true blood sugar value was: if someone were already at the high end of normal and a 'brittle diabetic', you can end up in 'diabetic ketoacidosis' for T1DM individuals or—less likely—'hyperosmolar hyperglycemic state' generally.
Sorry to be crass, but this type of argument is exactly why non-experts shouldn't be talking about topics they aren't experts on. Admittedly, I am also NOT an expert here - but I am married to a doctor and have gleaned a thing or two to be comfortable communicating this very, very specific retort.
Your argument completely ignores the massive, massive qualifier of "if not treated".
Low blood sugar is an acute emergency. Diabetics can die very quickly from low blood sugar (well anyone can, it's just diabetics are more at risk).
High blood sugar becomes interesting because it's generally systematic, untreated high blood sugar that leads to issues. For someone using a CGM and at least attempting to manage their blood sugar, it _should_ be hard for them to actually hit the high blood sugar emergency state. This condition is largely unique to people who have uncontrolled diabetes and have long, extended times of extreme blood sugar.
Caveat Emptor: I myself am not a doctor. I love to learn from my wife. I'm confident enough to present an argument on an internet forum, but I'm certainly not confident or qualified enough to give you or anyone _actual_ medical advice.
You can die on the order of hours to days not of high blood sugar per se, but of the low insulin causing diabetic ketoacidosis parent comment mentions.
It would be odd for a faulty sensor to cause an otherwise bad day into dka and death though. The sensor would need to be wildly off for hours and the user to not notice. Insulin delivery would need to be paused or greatly reduced for many hours. There are additional therapies like SGLT-2 that could make this more likely but they usually aren’t used with T1D precisely because they break the normally very strong correlation between inadequate insulin levels (leading to dka) and high blood glucose.
Even though I can’t think of an easy way for a false low(s) to turn into lethal DKA, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Abbott sells a lot of CGMs. It could have been a contributing factor to several deaths even if the fault would almost always not be a significant issue.
> Sorry to be crass, but this type of argument is exactly why non-experts shouldn't be talking about topics
> I myself am not a doctor. I love to learn from my wife.
I suggest that you speak to your wife before correcting my unimpeachable explanation of why someone might die from being told, incorrectly by their CGM, that their blood glucose is low.
I say this as someone doesn't need to rely on a spouse but have actually received my own medical education. And I've had my own HHS patients—it's not even clear if your wife (!!) works in this area.
As the sibling commentator shares, we don't really expect these patients to show up after a day of bad data, but we also have no idea how many days of bad data occurred.
> Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.
Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.
> Did Instagram have their LLM analyze the post and then only post generated slob when it concluded the post came from a woman? Certainly not.
I actually am sympathetic to your confusion—perhaps this is semantics, but I agree with the trivialization of the human experience assessment from the author and your post, but don't read it as an attack on women's pain as such. I think the algorithm sensed that the essay would touch people and engender a response.
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However, I am certain that Instagram knows the author is a woman, and that the LLM they deployed can do sentiment analysis (or just call the Instagram API and ask whether the post is by a woman). So I don't think we can somehow absolve them of cultural awareness. I wonder how this sort of thing influences its output (and wish we didn't have to puzzle over such things).
> Banks [...] will face meaningful consequences for getting this wrong with any regularity
That's false, unfortunately. There's amazing levels of discretion that banks enjoy and minimal accountability to end users. The CFPB (in the USA, anyway) was a countermeasure but has been recently weakened.
> That is correct, it was Gosling. This whole "controversy" is so stupid.
Graduate students aren't cited for coming up with innovations - the controversy is valid, but for some reason, people keep finding reasons to maintain a heterodox opinion.
The images weren't even shared with Watson/Crick by Franklin but by someone else.
Twinlaw's father is a super famous electrical engineer, retired professor emeritus with hundreds of papers (often as first) published author.
Be careful asking him about anything "he's published" since the mid-90s — because he often won't know anything about the topic. Instead, some grad-student lists you first to draw publicity to his own subordinate PhD / thesis.
After inventing a monumental concept in EE microchip design, you can just sort of rest on your laurels, just because of your name recognition (with permission, of course).
But after myself dropping out of grad school, decades ago, I've shared many lazy whiskeys with former colleagues, contemplating the "what if"s of two traveled old men. I regret nothing but happily engaged laziness.
> Graduate students aren't cited for coming up with innovations
Nonsense.
> the controversy is valid,
No. You can see both publications right here [1]. Watson and Crick explicitly say they are aware of the "general nature" of Franklin's results, but they are the only ones in that issue to propose the double helix structure with the specific features that explained all of the evidence, published and unpublished.
> My understanding is that it was done by her grad student, Raymond Gosling.
Ah yes, this is why we all know the name of the person who proposed the original iPhone project! And also why the name of the researcher who first thought of GPTs is on everyone's mind (and why nobody can remember the name of the laboratory where the work was done)!
And it's why whenever we invent something on our employer's dime, the patent doesn't bother to mention the people who took the risk of supporting the invention.
These people are academics, their entire career and ability to get continued funding depends on getting personal credit for their work. That is entirely different from working for a private company.
> Graduate students, and even post-doctoral researchers, are not the ones cited for breakthroughs from a laboratory.
What you are saying is not true- it is academic misconduct, with formal consequences, to not credit the person that did the work. Typically the grad student or postdoc that actually did the work is the first author listed on a publication, and the PI that advised and obtained funding is the last author. They both get credit for their respective roles in a very tangible way that is usually the deciding factor in career progression. They also personally both get listed on, and obtain a percentage of profits from any patents resulting from the work.
Moreover, no, researchers at a private for profit company like Google are not “academics.” They don’t need to follow strict institutional rules about fairly crediting people for their work, and they don’t need to bring in their own funding in the form of grants. An industry researcher only gets credit if their employer wishes them to, an academic is entitled to get credit for their work through formal rules.
> What you are saying is not true- it is academic misconduct, with formal consequences, to not credit the person that did the work.
This is true in the sense of purported plagiarism, but not in the sense of citing who is 'responsible for the idea'. Review articles will often cite a senior article when describing work performed over time, even if the primary authors have changed.
> Typically the grad student or postdoc that actually did the work is the first author listed on a publication, and the PI that advised and obtained funding is the last author.
This convention varies by field and is not universal. It is isn't even constant in all fields of biology
> They also personally both get listed on, and obtain a percentage of profits from any patents resulting from the work.
This depends strongly on where the work is done (even the department within a university)
> no, researchers at a private for profit company like Google are not “academics.” They don’t need to follow strict institutional rules about fairly crediting people for their work, and they don’t need to bring in their own funding in the form of grants. An industry researcher only gets credit if their employer wishes them to, an academic is entitled to get credit for their work through formal rules.
The assertion about no academics in companies is not true at all—being an academic has little to do with where money comes from (if this were true, there were no academics at all in the 1700s, an obviously false statement).
Bell Labs, Google, MS and others have formal research institutes within their organizations. I agree that each has conventions around recognition, just like in other areas of research.
I’m still not quite sure what you mean by credit, perhaps you mean casually using the PIs name over the students in things like review articles and talks?
I’m an academic PI and when I was first getting started as an undergrad I had a falling out with a lab that had an abusive and toxic culture, and tried to publish some of my work without crediting me after I had graduated and left. I was able to contest the authorship and the journal actually changed the author list to properly credit me.
Take a look at their figure, especially in May 2020—the average appears lower, but, more significantly, there is much less variability in May 2020 compared to earlier years.
The authors' model quite strongly includes their preferred confound (secular decrease in PM2.5) but doesn't explore what other covariates could explain the differences between years.
It's fine to say that one should be skeptical, but one contrary report doesn't invalidate an antecedent report, and the structure of a linear model strongly influences an outcome.
> This article is equivalent to calling the Boeing 737 unsafe because it's had the most Full Lost Events while completely ignoring it's flown 238.84M flights (which is basically more than the entire rest of the list combined).
It sounds like you aren't actually diabetic but feel comfortable explaining how people experience using the equipment they use to manage their disease?
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