All this suggests a rather high degree of consciousness and awareness of one’s surroundings while sleeping.

Garry Wainscott
Perth, Australia

Blastoff Bias?
“To the Moon and Beyond,” by Charles Dingell, William A. Johns and Julie Kramer White, posits NASA’s Orion space vehicle as a possible basis for a manned craft capable of traveling to Mars. The authors are all employees of NASA or Lockheed Martin (the lead contractor on the project), and this article represents a disturbing trend of presenting press releases or puff pieces as articles with journalistic integrity. A serious article on this project could have been written by a real science journalist, who would have weighed the claims of the NASA staff.

Gil Hennessey
New York City

The Hard Stuff
In “The Really Hard Science”, Michael Shermer laments the practice of labeling different fields of science as “hard” or “soft,” with “hard” sciences respected as being more “difficult.” This view is one I had not considered. I always saw physics and math as “hard,” not because they are considered more difficult but because they can be somewhat constrained. The “soft” sciences are less possible to constrain—their “laws” are more subject to interpretation and harder to confirm experimentally. Computing a planetary orbit can be carried to many decimal places with accuracy. Determining the level of anger in a given population can only be computed with statistical uncertainty. The latter is probably more difficult and the former more reliable.

Richard Podraza
via e-mail

1 Comments

1. 1. Go Yoshida 03:41 PM 3/9/08

   To be sure there is a dilemma of whether to permit earlier-stage patients, who have more established treatment options, to use an experimetal drugs or therapy for clinical trial, difficult-to-treat patients have resistance even to standard therapy.
   That is why patients with malignancy are not good for clinical trials.
   In any way, physicians have to keep in mind not to cause selection bias when analyzing the outcome of clinical trials.

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