We cannot all be ethicists

HDD cannot be advocated for all patients.

Sir, Saner and colleagues have made a good case for home haemodialysis (HHD) as an effective renal replacement therapy in Switzerland [1]. Yet, in the last paragraph of their case–cohort study of 58 patients, they admit that patient selection may have influenced their results. We agree. Our analysis of a much larger cohort, that of the United States Renal Data System, used the standardized mort...

Should we all be vegetarians?

The Shadows of a Cycle Cannot All Be Paths

A shadow of a subset S of Euclidean space is an orthogonal projection of S into one of the coordinate hyperplanes. In this paper we show that it is not possible for all three shadows of a cycle (i.e., a simple closed curve) in R to be paths (i.e., simple open curves). We also show two contrasting results: the three shadows of a path in R can all be cycles (although not all convex) and, for ever...

Good science? We should all be asking

Objectivity is a central tenet of the scientific process. That is, in order for science to be a successful tool for understanding the nature of reality it must be free from bias. This idea is so core to science that cases of explicit bias (e.g., data fabrication and false reporting of results) are both mystifying and sensational. In principle and (we hope) in practice, instances of bias can be ...

What do we know about what we cannot remember? Accessing the semantic attributes of words that cannot be recalled.

Two experiments examined access to the semantic attributes of words that participants failed to retrieve. The results indicated access to all 3 dimensions of the semantic differential--evaluation, potency, and activity, as revealed by attribute judgments and by the nature of the commission errors made. There was no evidence for superior access to the emotional-evaluative dimension, inconsistent...