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Showing posts with the label Julie Parsonnet

Just my thoughts #0772

When you go to the supermarket to buy vegetables, the prices are displayed. The final indicator of all the factors involved in growing the vegetable is its price. That price acts as a signifier. However, the price often changes. What causes the signifier to change? The reason could be the farmer, the climate, the distributor’s situation, or one of these factors might contribute. However, in today’s complex systems, another variable unrelated to vegetable cultivation could also affect the price, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The result of the interaction of these variables is the price. A change in the previous price points leads to a singularity in the ecosystem. Understanding what that singularity is and why it occurs can help us see the world differently. Depending on the analysis, we either take profits or identify the cause of losses. We should focus on singularities that alter the state of equilibrium. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”

Just my thoughts #0049

The "normal human body temperature = 37°C" standard was established in 1851 by the German medical doctor "Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich", who took millions of temperature readings from about 25,000 people and reported "36.2°C to 37.5°C". However, surveys in the United States in 1992 and the United Kingdom in 2017 found 36.8°C and 36.6°C, respectively. So in the past people deemed that the discrepancy was due to errors in old measuring equipment or methods. But Julie Parsonnet and her colleagues at Stanford University's School of Infectious Disease Epidemiology found a common thread in the temperature databases: People are cooler now than they were then. It wasn't just a measurement error. They speculated that medical advances had reduced inflammation and lowered the average temperature. We don't question the obvious. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”