It's traditional in text adventures that you infer un-helped verbs from the text (that is, if the verb is clued at all): here the wizard instructs you to 'say' the answer.
The ova all come from the germline so IMHO it's overwhelmingly likely they would have the same DNA but it's not exactly guaranteed: it depends if her ovaries are chimeric.
It’s more complicated. The germline cells are “chosen” in a very early stage of the embryo, and later they migrate to the ovary/testes. So perhaps the tissue of the ovaries are from one chimera-twin and the germline cells and the eggs from the other one. (Perhaps each embryo selected the germline cells, and both group moved to the ovary later??)
It's not uneducated to use Occam's razor: if someone tests as not being the mother, they almost always are not the mother. This is an every day occurrence.
Chimerism is a possible explanation but vanishingly unlikely. Two identified cases, ever (i.e. none before this).
I'm not disagreeing with you in thinking the scam is more likely at first glance, but as soon as there was compelling evidence it was not a scam, the professionals involved should have shared their awareness of the obvious biological possibly.
The smoking gun in this case that there was not a scam, but something more going on is the fact that she was her kids aunt.
Chimerism is well-studied because it's biologically interesting, but most social/medical professionals are not expected to come across human chimerism in their whole career.
Chimerism not often documented in humans and the other possibilities (e.g. surrogacy scam) are hugely more probable explanations.
I think the parent's point is that, while rare in practice, well-qualified physicians should easily identify the unusual situation and propose the alternate hypothesis.
As an aside, this fact was of great annoyance to me when I was younger, as the child of two pathologists trying to watch the tv show House. If you're not familiar, it's a medical mystery show with a genius misanthrope doctor named House who diagnoses people with extremely rare diseases, almost killing them in the process.
It was a regular occurrence for one of my parents to walk through the room while I was watching the show, in the first 5 minutes, and throw out, "they obviously have x (vasculitis, chimerism, etc.)," thus ruining the rest of the episode for me. Of course, they never actually watched the show, since from their perspective it was just an incompetent medical team torturing some patient.
That your parents and the parent commenter react in this way ("it's obvious") is by design of the author of the piece and the author of House.
I can watch an episode of House and anticipate "they obviously have lupus", which makes me feel intelligent and satisfied even though I can see they are planting obvious clues from the very start which a diagnostician would be mind-numbingly stupid to ignore.
The same with the headline of this article. It's designed that way. In reality, you don't get to read the headline or watch the episode before making a clinical decision.
Regarding House: in mid-series episodes, I believe they occasionally subvert this by planting clues for the wrong thing. At least, I enjoyed being wrong in those episodes.
We don't really know how common chimerism, because it is expensive to test for. It requires sampling many different tissues/ parts of the body and comparing the gentic material found in each. Some kinds of chimerism are easy to detect and are believed to be relatively common. See:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149...
What if a woman tests specifically as being the aunt instead of the mother, but also all her sisters (if any) test as aunts? Do we assume that the woman had a sister that none of her other sisters knew about, who she hid in the basement her whole life, impregnated with the woman's husband's sperm, raised the child as her own, repeated this several times, and then finally murdered the sister and hid her body?
I would disagree: it's certainly uneducated to use Occam's Razor as an excuse to be lazy, or perhaps to ruin another person's life based on one piece of evidence. The children's father vouched for her, she has witnesses to the birth of these children, etc. In fact, everything lines up with the children being hers except the DNA test results.
I would argue Occam's Razor decides against such a large conspiracy and, instead, points to problems with the test.
>The state was still so suspicious of Fairchild that when she gave birth to another child, a court officer stood in the delivery room to witness an immediate DNA test.
If you go as far as that, why wouldn't you test mitochondrial DNA? Using Ocamm's razor myself, I will speculate that she wasn't able to get a very good lawyer.
AFAIK -and please do correct me if I am wrong - twins have the same mitochondrial DNA, therefore even if she is a chimera all her cells should share the same mitochondrial DNA.
And isn't testing for mitochondrial DNA fairly simple/cheap?
Mitochondrial DNA between twins is expected to be almost identical, but you and I also have extremely similar mitochondria: since it doesn't recombine and rarely mutates. So, you have to get to a much deeper level to identify the differences.
Even if it's now possible/cheap, that's a recent development.
mtDNA is good for finding your (maternal) ancestral group, less so for your immediate relatives.
So, chimerism in the broad sense isn't that rare. I have no idea whether that is different from what is described here, but I would think it isn't. Those blood cells have to come from somewhere.
Chimerism also occurs as a result of organ transplants.
there is no Occam's razor when you're doing an in depth investigation. Either they do a cursory DNA test or they try testing the father too, and then everything is in depth.
(well I come form a country where the judicial system is inquisitory, not accusatory, so maybe I'm biased in my point of view)
If the mother was chimeric, she would be chimeric with a 'twin' from the same (grand)mother and father. Therefore her 'twin' chimera would share 50% of her DNA, as any regular sibling.
This would be identifiable on a DNA test as a close relative: she would be genetically equivalent to an aunt rather than a mother.
It's also surprising that they had to test the thyroid when the gametic cell line is the important one (wikipedia suggests they tested her cervix).
If the tests were reported to that level – and we're talking 2002 here – the fact that the child appeared to be from another relative wouldn't necessarily put the caseworkers at ease. (Was the child handed off between siblings as a form of welfare fraud?)
They got lucky with the thyroid test in the Boston (Keegan) case. The chimeric cells can be anywhere, in any proportions. (There's no guarantee the complete thyroid, or complete ovary is a single genome... so the 'luck of the stick' could change the results.)
Siblings don't share a guaranteed 50% of DNA, there's actually a chance (though remote) that they'd share no DNA.
Assuming each chromosome of a pair has an equal chance of being passed on (someone else got info on what, if anything, is known to change these odds?). So there are 2 x 2^23 possible chromosome sets. While the odds are low, it's entirely possible that two siblings with the same parents would have less than 50% of their DNA in common.
In the case of a chimeric individual, if they already were below 50% DNA in common, then the children they produce might appear as only distantly related, nieces and nephews at best.
True in theory, but unlikely to the point of irrelevant.
Assuming chromosomes are inhereted whole, the probability that siblings share less than 25% DNA - the equivalent of one further generation away - is 0.00531 (0.5% chance).
But chromosomes are not inherited whole - they recombine. This hugely reduces the probability even from that start point.
"A lot of advice says to only accept jobs which are willing to pay the rate you're offering..."
IMHO the rule is good, but you don't have to offer the same rate for each job. If there's a job that benefits you, work out what how much that benefits you and quote the appropriate rate. If there's a job that doesn't benefit you, double your normal rate.
Clients insisting on negotiating the rate is a negative signal. It may be a signal that they don't value your work at the rate you're quoting, and this is often a signal that they won't value your work. It may be a signal that they are under financial pressure (i.e. it's high risk for you). Better clients might ask for a discount but normally will agree if you stick to the quoted rate.
Good point, well made. That's partly what I was going for with what I said (money/learning benefits etc), but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't being a little bit forgiving with my negotiation. Especially with my latest contract, I was particularly unwilling to stick to too powerful guns because I'd just moved back to the UK and didn't have a flat yet. Things still seemed (and in fact, still do - I haven't moved into the new place yet) in flux. It's hard to make hard-nosed business decisions when things are a little bit all over the place. Nevertheless, the new contract has worked out quite well even though I was haggled down a little.
Spam is REJECTED and not deleted. In cause of a possible false positive the sender (!) will receive a non delivery report. Deleted e-mails is always forbidden.
It is not exactly clear (on the website) what you mean by 'rejected', so the English text could be improved to make your meaning more explicit. Perhaps 'returned' would be better?
In a technical language, "rejecting" (I don't accept that message) and "bouncing" (I accept it, but I will send it back later) is clear defined. Returning would be "bouncing", because I do NOT return, I do NOT ACCEPT.
They should be slightly more explicit, but "...before the e-mails are accepted and reject anything that looks suspicious..." almost certainly means that spam is rejected with a 5xx message - or goes to your InBox, but is never accepted then hidden from you in a spam folder.
It's a good approach, and from a legal perspective I'm surprised more systems don't take this approach, because legally (at least in my local jurisdiction), you're deemed to have received an email when it "enters that information system" - i.e. when your SMTP server says 250.
This stuff matters quite a lot in the formation of contracts.
Yes, but the "bounce message" comes to the sender from their own mail system, saying "could not deliver".
This is important, because the receiving system doesn't have a guaranteed way of reaching the sender - modern spam typically fakes the "From:" and <return-path> fields - so well-run systems nowadays never try to do so for fear of generating what's referred to as email backscatter spam.
You can also pass the test this way by having "generous" judges contributing to the 1/3, which is likely because the judges are not impartial: they are emotionally invested in being part of a positive result. I wonder how Kevin Warwick himself voted, for example.
A more correct test (which admittedly doesn't cover this issue) would be to give each judge a conversation with one human and one computer, and for them to say which one they believe is the human.
Suppose you are one of London's 72 resident billionaires, and you're making 5% or so on your income.
You can pay for this digger in an hour, by spending that hour sitting on your ass, and it's not that you will be re-spending that money in your lifetime anyway. Fill it in or have someone salvage it, do whichever is quicker: you've got other things to do with your life and one of those things is to enjoy your new pool.
(Whether true or not, this acts as a good illustration of the scale of income inequality)
Why would the billionaire in question even be concerning himself with the transportation of some machinery? This decision would be taken by whoever was in charge of the excavation.
I'd have to agree. Just tell someone "there is a fully functional digger down, it's free, but you have to get it out."
Hell, people will come and haul away scrap steel from the bottom of a lake. A digger worth $10,000? 4 guys and 8 hours and each of them just made $2500 for a day's work.
Chances are you don't get to be a (self-made) billionaire without throwing away $5k here and there.
If you're spending your time saving easily recoverable $5ks, you might get to be a millionnaire but you will never get to be a billionaire: it's totally irrelevant on that scale.
Equivalent statement:
You don't get to buy a house without picking pound coins up off the street.
Or you inherited it? Or your a middle eastern minor prince, or your a Russian who was in the first place at the right time and got a good deal ( ;-) ) on some Soviet privitaisation.
Not all billionaires pulled themselves up by their bootstraps
> I can't really understand the effort of deleting everything either. I highly doubt Google ever really deletes anything. Once you've sent it to their servers, the cat is out of the bag.
There are presumably technical differences in how this data is stored and processed over time, which may not be insignificant.
Delete data today and it might be wiped; delete data tomorrow and it might be parcelled into a company takeover.
I tend to think that deleting data gets it flagged forever. What are the last 5 status updates you deleted on Facebook, if you ever did it? How many dollars would you pay for your worst ennemy's deleted posts?
> The ancient ancestor of the first black widow might not have been some peculiar middle ground between benign and lethal, yet the random mutation of offspring which proliferated merely happened to be highly deadly.
This is possible but not very likely in reality.
We expect evolution to be incremental, for the following reasons:
First of all, it's very unlikely that any mutation would get to "Surprise! Lethal!" venom unless the species is already geared up to produce something venom-like, and also to store venom and to protect itself from its own venom. There's a whole bunch of new functions that are needed to be venomous, and it's vanishingly unlikely that they will all suddenly appear at the same time, even at evolutionary scale.
IMO mutations normally have small positive effects and large negative effects: they are more likely to delete or - if you're lucky - alter some existing function and very unlikely to build a whole new function (compare: a small random change to your computer code).
Even if super-lethal venom was to somehow appear overnight, then in order to reach 100% prevalence it must provide such an immediate advantage that the non-lethal spiders die out and only super-lethal spiders proliferate.
But the non-lethal spiders were surviving pretty well in order to reach that point. So, there's no reason to believe the non-lethal spiders were in particular danger or that lethal venom was needed - normally, the "Surprise! Lethal!" variant line would just quietly die out (as almost all variants do) leaving the wild non-lethal type.
As I say, the random mutation explanation is possible but not really practical.
A far more plausible scenario is an "arms race" - where venomous functions develop over time, while predators and prey develop immunity over time - as the predators (honey badger) start evolving coping mechanisms, stronger venom is needed.
Text adventures used to be hard!