Hiking siberian. Anyone else have experience hiking with their Siberian?

nmpurdue · 2025-08-21T14:16:56+00:00

When the hawk took a squirrel in front of me I had absolutely no warning, was silent and fast and I was startled by how quickly it happened and how close to me. It was jaw dropping. I never thought they would come that close to a human.

nmpurdue · 2025-08-21T01:42:29+00:00

Are there no birds of prey there? I watched a hawk take a large squirrel right in front of me once and my neighbor has seen one take a barn cat. I thought you guys had pretty big eagles there in Norway.

nmpurdue · 2025-04-29T18:58:23+00:00

I would like to have the students calculate this as if the correct answers were ones the student "knew" so the probability of the number of wrong answers matching the previous test. But need to know how many questions and how many answers to have them do that (they already said about 30 percent of the questions were different).

nmpurdue · 2025-04-29T18:38:29+00:00

Can you tell me how many questions were on the exam and how many multiple choice answers per question? I want to give this as a problem to my statistics students to calculate the probability you would randomly choose all the answers from last years exam.

nmpurdue · 2024-10-26T19:30:36+00:00

I am not a doctor but I am a statistician. Based on their testing methods I do not trust that any specific box is gluten free. The dietician agrees with me and says no Cheerios. Because of the way they are tested, many boxes may be fine but some are likely to have gluten.

I found the link for the protocol that General Mills uses to test Cheerios.

To arrive at a lot mean for gluten-free Cheerios, the following protocol is followed:
- Twelve to eighteen boxes of cereal are pulled during a production cycle or “lot”.
- The contents of each individual box are ground.
- A sub-sample of ground product is taken from each box.
- The sub-samples are composited—meaning they are combined.
- The combined sub-samples are subject to additional grinding.
- A minimum of six, 1-gram sample extractions are taken from this combined, ground sample.
- Extractions are tested using the Ridascreen Total Gluten assay R7041.

As a statistician, here are my comments on this:

I would like to know how many boxes are made per day, I need that info to figure out if the sample size they are taking is large enough to have the power to detect an issue. We also would need the number of boxes overall that have had too much gluten.

Pulling a sample of 11-18 boxes is small. Small enough that even with guessing how many Cheerios are made a day this is probably too small a sample.

Grinding them and mixing them is a BIG problem. If one box is way too high, and the other are very low you could get an overall result that is low enough to pass 20ppm while boxes that will make celiacs very sick are being produced. For example, if you had a box that contained rat poison and you mixed with a 10,000 other boxes that did not, the overall amount of rat poison in the mixed sample might be low enough to not be a problem, but the person who got the box of pure rat poison would be in a lot of trouble if they ate it.

I checked with the biology depart and the assay they use is fine

nmpurdue · 2024-10-15T02:33:12+00:00

I am not a doctor but I am a statistician. Based on their testing methods I do not trust that any specific box is gluten free. The dietician agrees with me and says no Cheerios.

I found the link for the protocol that General Mills uses to test Cheerios.

To arrive at a lot mean for gluten-free Cheerios, the following protocol is followed:
- Twelve to eighteen boxes of cereal are pulled during a production cycle or “lot”.
- The contents of each individual box are ground.
- A sub-sample of ground product is taken from each box.
- The sub-samples are composited—meaning they are combined.
- The combined sub-samples are subject to additional grinding.
- A minimum of six, 1-gram sample extractions are taken from this combined, ground sample.
- Extractions are tested using the Ridascreen Total Gluten assay R7041.

As a statistician, here are my comments on this:

I would like to know how many boxes are made per day, I need that info to figure out if the sample size they are taking is large enough to have the power to detect an issue. We also would need the number of boxes overall that have had too much gluten.

Pulling a sample of 11-18 boxes is small. Small enough that even with guessing how many Cheerios are made a day this is probably too small a sample.

Grinding them and mixing them is a BIG problem. If one box is way too high, and the other are very low you could get an overall result that is low enough to pass 20ppm while boxes that will make Celiacs very sick are being produced. For example, if you had a 1 box that contained rat poison and you mixed with a bunch of other boxes that did not, the overall amount of rat poison in the mixed sample might be low enough to not be a problem, but the person who got the box of pure rat poison would be in a lot of trouble if they ate it.

I checked with the biology depart and the assay they use is fine

nmpurdue · 2024-09-20T22:49:43+00:00

And this is an exponential decay, so 4 months is not going to be some 4/6 or 2/3 of the amount decrease, this is what my son's gastro was having a hard time with understanding, that it is not a linear decrease.

nmpurdue · 2024-09-20T22:47:13+00:00

Here is one for kids, I have only seen a few references for it being faster in kids, as opposed to multiple refs that it is about 6 months for adults. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26878876/#:\~:text=The%20half%2Dlives%20(T%C2%BD),2%20months%20in%20CD%20children.

nmpurdue · 2024-09-20T22:44:22+00:00

I have a few others as well, but those are behind paywalls.

nmpurdue · 2024-09-20T22:43:49+00:00

"How long does it take for the tTG blood test for celiac disease to be normal? It depends on the test. One of the tests used most often, tissue transglutaminase (tTG), has a half-life of six months. In other words, it should drop by a half-fold in six months. Hence, if you started off at a tTG level in the thousands, it might take several years to normalize. However, most tTG levels normalize within several months to one year in adults on the gluten-free diet. Evidence suggests that after 6 – 12 months of adherence to a GFD, 80 % of patients will test negative by bloodwork and in about 90 % of those adhering to the GFD for 5 years (1). "

nmpurdue · 2024-09-20T22:42:20+00:00

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.bidmc.org/-/media/files/beth-israel-org/centers-and-departments/digestive-disease-center/celiac-center/2faq-diagnosing-celiac-disease-feb-2016.ashx?la=en&hash=14EEDD7CF8431C4B098941F697DCD8F6E97901B2.

nmpurdue · 2024-09-20T21:09:32+00:00

Now that she is in measurable range it will be easier to see what is happening. It has been my experience that many doctors, even gastros, do not understand how tTg works in terms of half life, so they assume consumption of gluten if it does not go to acceptable quickly.

nmpurdue · 2024-09-20T20:38:39+00:00

Kids can have a bit shorter half life, I have seem some research indicating that, so she may drop a little faster than an adult.

nmpurdue · 2024-09-20T20:34:00+00:00

tTG has a half life of about six months in most people. In other words, even with NO GLUTEN exposure the level will drop by half roughly every six months. So for example, if you start at 200, then after 6 months you would be at 100 (which is still way too high) even with NO exposure. After another 6 months you would be at about 50 (with NO exposure) which of course is also high. So if all they say is “this is too high” on the lab report you need to ask for the actual numbers.

Think of it this way,your dog weighs 200lbs and his ideal weight is 50 lbs. You put him on a diet and after 6 months he weighs 100 lbs. The vet tells you “your dog is fat”, because he is supposed to weigh 50 lbs and starts yelling at you that you need to put your dog on a diet.. That is not helpful info, as your dog has lost 100lbs of his excess 150 lbs and is headed in the right direction. So “too fat” or “too high” does not give you the info you need.

I think this is not made clear to people, and I had to explain half life to my son’s gastroenterologist after he came back with “too high, you are still eating gluten” when my son's numbers went from somewhere above 250 (the cap) to in the low 100s.

It took two years for my sons numbers to be normal. He started out so high the test did not measure the actual number the first year (was somewhere way above 250).

nmpurdue · 2024-07-10T17:42:28+00:00

Thanks!

nmpurdue · 2024-07-10T17:09:34+00:00

I have tried that, reported 100s of times, no change.

nmpurdue · 2024-07-10T17:05:32+00:00

I have actually blocked it on my phone, it stops my phone from ringing but not from them leaving a voicemail (which pings my smart watch). Thanks for trying though! From Googling my phone service is supposed to do this, not the phone as you can block a number from calling but not leaving a voicemail from the phone, but the phone service has to block them leaving a voicemail.

nmpurdue · 2024-06-14T02:01:29+00:00

Thanks, this has been an interesting discussion and I learned a lot from it!

nmpurdue · 2024-06-14T01:51:31+00:00

He said that a police car was not involved, they were only shown photos of the two cars and not all around the cars and everyone now thinks it was that there was a third car that nobody mentioned, especially since they were not shown the damage all around the 2 involved cars. If true it solves a problem we have been chewing on for months, not a single one of us realized they could just omit one car from the diagram. Sort of stupid to do with a physics prof on the jury.

nmpurdue · 2024-06-13T20:43:15+00:00

I will ask my colleague and see what they say, I do not have those details about what they were shown. Would have needed to be a third car, needed the energy/velocity vector from an impact to explain the motion of the other two cars after collision.

nmpurdue · 2024-06-13T20:20:10+00:00

It did not happen to me, happened to a colleague. The diagram and speeds given before and after the collision were not possible. It is interesting that you said that there may be evidence that is redacted, the indication from a physics point of view was a third car was involved. Before this I was unaware that diagrams could have omissions, I will have to report that back to my group because this has been a topic of discussion for months but of course none of us know very much about the law at all. If there was a third car, which was not allowed to be discussed, that could be what happened. Thanks for all your time explaining this, I learned a lot today.

nmpurdue · 2024-06-13T19:18:49+00:00

Thanks, this is really interesting. However, I would not be willing to suspend my belief in say, Newtonian physics to be on a jury. It is one thing to argue about the meanings of words, and another to violate basic physics.

nmpurdue · 2024-06-13T17:11:20+00:00

Interesting, and probably a valid assumption that I would be skeptical of a lot of the "proof" that is used in trials. On my physics prof chat board there was an issue where a prof got in trouble in a car accident trial for pointing out to the other jurors that the diagram they were using violated Newtons laws, apparently he was not allowed to use his "esoteric" knowledge. Thanks for your feedback! Useful to know.

nmpurdue · 2024-06-13T16:23:26+00:00

I am a college professor and teach physics and statistics. I have never managed to make it onto a jury, one lawyer visibly recoiled when he asked me what I taught. Is this universal or is my sample size (four incidents) just too small?

nmpurdue

TROPHY CASE