#it was a major tool in colonialism and it’s adoption as a means to validity in a white supremecist system can be seen echoing in China’s

[trainsinanime]

I sometimes reblog posts about US Americans being weird here, but honestly I don't love how angry or smug most of these posts are. It's just that angry and smug posts tend to get more traction, and so they get reblogged more, and so I tend to see them and reblog them myself. Hm, maybe there's a lesson for all of social media and for me in particular here.

Anyway, what I want out of these posts is not for any US Americans here to feel bad; it's just "funny" and perhaps, perhaps a tiny bit of consideration for how being US American means you experience the internet on easy mode.

This is not your personal fault. Nor is it ethically wrong. It's just a thing that exists, and it may be worth thinking about it.

Examples of that easy mode include:

It's your language. The vast majority of people on the internet need to know a second language to at least participate passively, let alone actively post. It's not just the internet; for e.g. my job, all documentation for all the tools is only in English, and I was required to listen to English lectures and write both my bachelor's and master's thesis in English, my second language, to pass. That's why e.g. posts about bilingualism tend to cause a bit of a discussion, because knowing a second language isn't a special skill but a necessary survival tool.

It is your world-wide culture. The list of most popular video games, TV shows, movies and songs tend to be fairly similar across the world (in particular the part of it we call it the western world, another discussion that I'll get into below), and they're dominated by the output of US media. There is no equivalent to e.g. Disney anywhere outside of the US.

It's your debates and discussions. Because of the huge importance the US has economically and culturally (not to mention militarily), we tend to discuss US topics a lot, and we tend to discuss them from an American point of view.

This introduces American oddities into a lot of the world. For example, I'm a STEM guy, I have a STEM education, a STEM job and my primary hobbies are also STEM based, so what I notice are imperial measurements like feet and inches. Those are not "one of two equally valid choices", they're the unique hobby of the English-speaking countries, and within them, increasingly only the US. But we still tend to see them here as if they were a normal usual thing, and often europeans (including me) feel compelled to provide translations into these units.

But it's not limited to that, court room dramas are another example where courts in the English-speaking world tend to work very differently from those in the rest of the world. E.g. there's no pleading guilty or innocent in most of the world. There are boundless more examples of that, and these things can be grating every once in a while.

As I said before, I don't think there's any moral value here either way. You're not wrong for being an American (but you're also not better because of it). As I hinted at before, I'm still in a very privileged position myself, being from a wealthy European country, and my culture even without Disney is still far closer to that of the US than it is to most of the rest of the world. I'm sitting in the very same glass house, just maybe a different corner (TODO fix this metaphor before posting).

For example, I'm talking about court rooms and inches versus meters, but if we're thinking about history and ethics, there's deep issues in both of them. When it comes to measurements, it's ultimately the question of whether you use the measurements of London or those of Paris. For most of the world it's a colonial imposition either way. You can make arguments for why one is better for technology than the other (and as you can probably guess, I have strong opinions here), but in the grand scheme of things, neither of them is more "ethical" or more "universal", not really anyway. Same with the way legal systems work, where again, countries either adopted (and more often than not were forced to adopt) either the English system or the French system (with quite a few countries choosing to adopt the German version of the French system as well).

I know that's a boring digression but it's something that's usually missing from these posts, especially ones written by europeans, including some I've written myself. I don't really have a conclusion to any of this either, except perhaps that this is something that's worth being aware of.

[hazzabeeforlou]

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[montagnarde1793]

silver-whistle a réagi à votre billet : silver-whistle a réagi à votre billet : ...

I only regard self-determination as applying to the individual self. I don’t regard anyone else having the right to tell me who/what I’m allowed to be. I’ve experienced that too often on several fronts. And when you’re told that after living somewhere for nearly 30 years, having family roots there going back milennia, that you didn’t deserve a vote because you weren’t born there…

Well, I absolutely agree that people should be able to vote where they live and majorities, while they are a useful decision-making tool, can’t legitimate taking anyone’s rights away (resistance to oppression and all that), I’m not sure I quite understand the implications of the rest of your position as far as legislation goes.

I mean, if you’re going to say, vote for some kind of regulation, concretely it has to apply in a certain jurisdiction. If that jurisdiction is the entire world, then the entire world would have to vote on it. Anything short of that and it has to apply to a particular territory and I don’t see any way around that.

Personal identity can be dematerialized, but most things that legislation touches are more concrete. For things like environmental regulations, arguably people outside that territory who are affected deserve a say, but generally speaking it makes sense that the people who actually have to live on that territory decide.

Now, that’s not the current situation, but (I think?) that’s not what it sounds like you’re suggesting either. I mean, to take an example, say we want to regulate river traffic on the Loire. Who should fairly decide this? We might answer: people who live along the Loire, everyone in France, everyone in Europe or everyone in the world, but surely it would at minimum have to include the people directly concerned because of the concrete territory they inhabit, no? I just don’t really see a way around territoriality.

What I do oppose is the idea of territoriality as a kind of permanent status. You should be able to vote where you live. If you leave, you should be able to vote in the new place and if you come back, you should be able to vote again in the original place.

But I get it, this mostly about Brexit, which I concur was a bad idea that harms a lot of people without really benefitting anyone. You had certain rights as a European citizen (not sovereign rights, really, because it’s not the European Parliament that’s in control — unfortunately European institutions are just as flawed if not moreso than many national constitutions, and if anything harder to change — but other kinds of rights, certainly) and a majority of UK citizens (not even UK residents, who are also obviously effected) took that away. Majorities are not always right, granted, and when they make bad decisions individuals are within their rights to combat them.

But does it follow from that that we should make into a general principle that countries are never allowed to change whatever jurisdictions the contingencies of history have placed them in? After all, the EU hasn’t always existed and it was in theory a majority, or at least a majority government in each country that decided to join it (or at least its predecessors which were not yet the EU). Did that decision not have validity? Did a majority in Avignon in 1791 not a have a right to decide to become part of France? After all, there was a non-insignificant minority who liked being under papal rule enough to fight a bloody civil war with that majority over the question... Granted, those were decisions to make a larger jurisdiction, but isn’t the whole principle of sovereignty the reversibility of decisions? But I find this is a question it’s difficult to generalize on. Perhaps we might say a separation with a larger entity is justifiable if all the inhabitants are actually consulted (this would probably rule out Brexit, as well as things like the secession of the Southern US states, since it’s not as if the slaves were consulted)? Or perhaps if breaking away is the only way to actually exercise your rights, as in the case of colonial independence?

And the EU, alas, takes away rights as well: neoliberal ideology is baked into a number of its treaties, forcing individual countries to adopt austerity and unlimited competition — which wouldn’t be a problem if the European Parliament could override them, but there as it stands, the EU is in the fundamentally contradictory position of continuing to recognize national sovereignty while still wanting to have directives at the European level that no higher European sovereignty is capable of challenging. Basically the treaties function as a particularly unchangeable kind of constitution, since you need unanimity among the member states to change them, rather than say, a simple or even a 2/3 majority of the people of all those states in agregate. I mean, it’s already pretty impossible to change the US Constitution with its requirements for either 2/3 of Congress or 2/3 of the states, but it would really be properly impossible if unanimity were required.

There is actually one thing the US does right though, which is a minimum of solidarity between states that’s sadly lacking in Europe. There is a massive economic imbalance between states in the US, but the federal government doesn’t oblige the states that are doing less well to privatize everything and rip any safety net or social programs they may have to shreds in order to receive federal aid while the ecomically successful states write snide editorials about how the people of those states are stealing from them because they’re lazy and inferior. Under those circumstances, while I oppose Brexit, I don’t know what other bargaining chip Greece had to avoid its current fate than threatening to leave the EU, or at least the Euro zone.

Basically, these questions bother me because I can’t think of any universal principle that neatly sorts all these cases: a majority shouldn’t be able to take anyone’s rights away, but concretely, it’s sometimes that case that the same decision could take away some rights while restoring others.

And the contours of “Europe” or the “US” are just as arbitrary as those of the nations or states that compose them. My parents, who live in California, would probably be upset if California seceded and they lost their US citizenship, but they’re not currently upset that they don’t have North American citizenship, with the ability to collectively make decisions among a majority of all Canadians, USians and Mexicans? Why is that, other than historical contingency? And EU, with the complicity of its member nations, is just as nasty about “protecting” its borders as any entity calling itself a nation.

I do apologize for the length of this reply, but these are questions I’m working through myself. It’s clear that the entire system needs an overhaul — the EU, individual states, capitalism — but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to acheive it...

[juniperpublisherscasestudies]

Juniper Publishers- Open Access Journal of Case Studies

Emerging Role of Mass Spectrometry on Clinical Setting: Critical Issues and Perspectives

Authored by Alessio Cortelazzo

Before Mass Spectrometry Finds Application in the Real Clinical Setting

Before the latter half of the 20th century, no translation into routine clinical practice of several molecules was achieved during MS-based biochemical research applications. Criticism was raised, especially regarding the reproducibility of the MS studies performed. The most widely criticized items in MS-based biomarker discovery studies were

a) The adoption of standardized operating procedures for pre-analytical and analytical items,

b) Poor study design,

c) Lack of multi-centric studies, and

d) Unreliable data evaluation and statistical analyses [1].

The lack of standardization, widely considered a relevant source of random and systematic errors, has been the basis for uncertainty of analytical results and poor comparability. The successful use of mass spectrometry for the discovery of clinically-relevant novel possible molecular biomarkers required a careful consideration of standardized operating procedures, for pre-analytical variables, including samples handling and storage [1].

Go to

Primary Limitations of Mass Spectrometry and Challenges

MS applications associated with gas chromatography separation (GC-MS) have been the “gold standard” in specialized clinical laboratories for the quantitation of drugs, organic acids and steroids. A primary limitation of GC-MS was that analytes needed to be volatile and thus most clinical assays required multiple extraction/purification steps along with a chemical derivatization to render the analytes sufficiently volatile for analysis [2].

Yet, there are still problems in the clinical application of MS, including sample preparation, online extraction, throughput, automation, laboratory information system interfacing, inter-instruments standardization and harmonization, and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation.

The widespread implementation of expanded newborn screening programs using tandem MS “profiling” of amino acids and acyl-L-carnitines has been effective and beneficial. Over time, quantitative analyzes are required. Ms “profiles” are not quantitative: neither standardized calibrants nor multiple-point calibration curves are used.

MS is slowly transforming the practice of laboratory medicine and is being driven by several factors, including improved analytical specificity and sensitivity. The measurement of thyroglobulin is a clinical example for which MS has been shown to offer superior assay quality compared to traditional immunoassays.

The main challenges for MS include

a) The high capital cost of equipment,

b) Requirements for a skilled labor force,

c) Lack of automation, and

d) Regulatory uncertainty [3].

i. Cost reduction is considered a major pressure driving the adoption of MS but the initial capital cost of the equipment is high and laboratory expertise in the development, validation, and maintenance of MS-based assays may be limited.

ii. The requirement for skilled labor is especially acute for MS applications based on laboratory-developed challenges tests (LDTs). LDTs require considerable expertise in method development and validation. These talents are difficult to acquire in a training environment and generally require several years of practical experience in a functional MS laboratory to become proficient.

iii. Lack of automation for both sample preparation and data reporting and (FDA) regulations on laboratorydeveloped tests are great examples that require multiple parties to work together to come up with better solutions for the field.

iv. The area of LDTs has also been evolving in recent years as the FDA and other related agencies determine how best to regulate an area that has been somewhat of a grey area.

The FDA’s “Analytical Procedures and Methods Validation for Drugs and Biologics: Guidance for Industry”, along with other such guidelines, defines approaches that are proven to provide excellent accuracy and precision when quantifying analytes in biological matrices.

Go to

At the Near Future MS-Based Laboratory: Critical Points and Perspectives

For capacity, accuracy, and specificity of analysis, the use of MS in clinical diagnostics and clinical research has grown dramatically in recent years. Clinical applications of MS continue to expand, and MS is now being used in almost all areas of laboratory medicine.

Various types of MS with high specificity (i.e., liquid chromatography coupled with MS; matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization/time-of-flight-MS, MALDI-TOF-MS), are being increasingly valued and utilized as tools in clinical laboratories. These MS techniques overcome the limitations of immunoassays and offer many advantages over earlier approaches [4].

A particularly effective tool for improving throughput of MS has been the development of multiplex assays. Nowadays, main novel applications of MS include clinical imaging applications and microbiology. The use of MS for microbiology testing is a somewhat distinct application which appears poised for explosive growth over the next several years. The major advantages over alternatives are its ability to identify microbes in a much shorter time, with less work, and with greater accuracy. From a culture or colony, the system can identify the microbes in minutes rather than many hours required with older techniques. In a clinical diagnostic setting, the time savings can equate to a major benefit in terms of treatment and economics [5].

Go to

At the Near Future MS-Based Laboratory: Critical Points and Perspectives

MS is unsurpassed in its combination of sensitivity, specificity, and speed. Fully computerized and reliable instruments have made possible the use of this powerful tool in clinical medicine. While MS has grown rapidly and holds great promise, remain several critical-points relating to its use in clinical applications, including its complexity, high upfront cost, lack of userfriendliness, low throughput as well as the complexity of the science and the associated regulatory process [6].

A fundamental step for setting up an MS-based laboratory service is deciding what instrumentation to purchase. The choice of instrumentation mainly depends on the analytes of interest. For most small-molecule quantitative methods (i.e., testosterone, vitamin D and drugs of abuse) a triple-quadrupole MS with LC is the instrument of choice. Triple-quadrupole mass spectrometers are also used for newborn screening and for quantification of peptides and proteins. For a clinical microbiology laboratory interested in qualitative identification of a variety of microbes, a MALDI-TOF-MS is optimal [6].

In the next future, with emerging technologies in MS, we expect to see more robust and reliable MS applications with a broad menu of tests that will become routine diagnostic tools in clinical laboratories.

As MS moves deeper into the clinical space, some vendors are offering “platforms certified” for clinical use, which means handling regulatory requirements.

The miniaturization of MS systems being pursued at places and could allow a transportable device that minimizes the specialized skill set required for operators and allows for rapid and accurate MS analysis in a point-of-care format.

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