Undercover in the Library- 4

Undercover with the gift from a dear friend :) I love you!

Aaaah, I was so close to starting my paper, but I had to do 5 simultaneous things in one day, all related to academia. A very wise dear friend once told me that if you succeed in doing one thing in a foreign country you can be very happy that day.. So I managed to find Physics Library, barrow a book and use the copier machine with my copy-card. Wow! Yes, then I will not torture myself about not starting the paper.. In 5 minutes the library is closing... Let me see if I can finish this post..

So, what is Evidence Based Medicine (EBM)? As it is evident from it's name, it is based on scientific evidence where the best evidence is considered to be the meta-analysis of  randomized control trials (RCT).

Then what are RCTs? Being one of the experimental/ intervention studies, they are conducted with subjects/patients that meet certain criteria in order to decide an outcome of an intervention. If you wanna know more then read the italic part, if not just skip it ;) Subjects that are intervened are distributed randomly to two groups, one being control and another treatment group; and in a given time with an adequate number of subjects, outcomes are collected and metaanalysis is done by statisticians and researcher. The analyzed intervention is applied to treatment group and usually placebo used for the control group. One of the most important aspects of RCTs is that they try to eliminate bias by blinding. They might only use placebos for eliminating bias for the participants as well as might use double blinding by also not informing the researchers about which intervention given to which group. There are also triple and quadruple blindings where in addition, study investigators and statisticians respectively are blinded. 

Our doctors base their decisions mostly on meta-analysis of RCTs to prescribe us some drugs, to relieve our symptoms. They cannot tell us to do other things because they have to obey the rules of EBM. Do you ever remember going to a doctor with a cold infection and the doctor asking if you slept regularly for the last couple of days, or whether you are under stress due to your job/ school? Or if you have a troubling relationship with the significant other.. In general, they are not designated to find the cause of an illness, they are designated to relieve the symptoms. But is this curing? (Surgical removings put aside) Can all of us be treated with average approaches? Am I an individual with a history or an average person with an average height? Oh they do not care about this in EBM.. If you care you become "Alternative"!

Mechanical thinking govern our lives in every little bits and pieces...

So much about the EBM... How it will be connected to the time travel has to wait for another post.. This has already been a mechanical and a boring post :) And the beautiful song of "library closing" with the announce "Bitte beachten Sie .... :)" propagating right now..

Stay tuned for the secrets of the universe and click for the previous episodes: Episode 1, Episode 2 and Episode 3

Undercover in the Library - 2

Hiding between the books... reporting...

While volcano's ashes in the air and me having a mild congestion I will try to explain the secrets of the universe  just a bit further today...

Most of the mathematicians usually work as carpenters and regard their material as quite real and secure. They build structures and those structures turn out to be quite solid... But also there is meta-mathematics...Which means analyzing mathematics with the tools of mathematics... We will come back to that..

When quantifier logic was established by Frege, it was phenomenal. People went crazy over it! It was the code of the universe! Well not really... But they really thought they can deduct all the mathematics and language from the logical rules. They, after all thought, logical rules as the descriptive rules of thinking and it was the code right then and there. And mathematical tools got even stronger and practical... A second Pythagorean phase was at stake, fortunately Godel was not killed when he revealed the Incompletenes Theorem to the public...

1. What comes after this? Paradoxes?

2. Why do we generally work 8 hours a day?

3. Will I be ever able to fly to London again?

4. Is Artificial Intelligence possible?

5. Are numbers real things? Ideas? Thoughts?

They will be all linked... No worries.. Oh not the third one. I was just wondering!

Today's great news: I got the DAAD scholarship. Yay!

Undercover in the Library

The secrets of universe are revealed by the undercover owl..

I cannot believe how I did not think of this before. Taking the pictures with my laptop. It's Friday and I am tired. Just hanging out in the library. In the reading lounge and finally showing a picture of it! This is the place I take a break, chat, sleep, check out facebook, emails :) Everybody take their shoes off, put their legs up, sleep or read. It's so cozy. 

I have joined the classes this week. Only two of them. I would like to attend some more and in a diversity. Here in Philosophy department not many people are interested in Logic. Moreover, recently, I started to have doubts about effectiveness and adequacy of Logic and Language after studies of Relativity, Incompleteness and Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). How are these things related?  Well, Incompleteness Theorem showed that logic is not able to capture all the truths of mathematics. A lot of people thought, it actually showed the boundaries of mathematics, except the person who proved it. He believed mathematics had much more than logic can prove. Only getting out of the formal thinking and by intuitively grasping one has a chance to understand the "whole" mathematical truth, he claimed... Relativity Theory denied the theory of absolute time since "now" cannot be the same for the two observers travelling with different speeds. The methods EBM are using must be mechanical and they ignore individuals. So, when you go to a doctor for some illness you get something for symptom relief and nobody really looks for the causes in your lives. 

I think we are going in the wrong direction with our methods in science and living... Stay tuned I will explain why in the next posts...

Would love to hear your thoughts as well. Do not hesitate to comment ;)