Word: guesswork
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Pinker has little patience with critics, particularly Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who accuses evolutionary psychologists in general (and presumably Pinker as well) of indulging a "penchant for narrow and often barren speculation" and "pure guesswork in the cocktail-party mode." Pinker has even less patience with those who would confuse an evolutionary explanation for how the human mind evolved with the idea that our fate is genetically predetermined. Genes, he says, "do not dictate what we should accept or how we should live...
...that doctors don't know in advance what they are dealing with. Most physicians use trial and error: they prescribe a treatment and if it doesn't work, they try another until they find a remedy. Now scientists at Ohio University are trying to cut through some of that guesswork by fashioning a simple 15-min. screening test that will tell doctors where the pain occurs, how debilitating it is and what other factors (such as stress) may be contributing to it. The hope is that physicians will be able to determine in advance whether their patients will respond better...
...salivating. "What we want to do is establish an immortal cell line, something like an embryonic stem cell line, where you can produce literally unlimited numbers of these things," Donald Wolf, a senior scientist at the center, said at a news conference Sunday. Those "things" figure to take some guesswork out of medical research, since scientists working with thoroughly identical subjects can be confident that results are not subject to genetic foibles. They could also reduce the number of animals that would be needed in a given experiment, making research cheaper and requiring fewer monkeys. "The downside," Wolf said...
...take a while to get used to. First you have to learn the pattern, which is not easy. See, a lot of people think you're just sitting there driving--well, you have a blind side. You have a side you can't see. It's a lot of guesswork...
...Duke routinely use the computer to provide the best treatment possible for their own patients, like Therwell Wrenn (see photo panel next page), an electronic-components designer suffering from coronary-artery disease. To some extent, the bytes and bits stored on those ordinary-looking machines have taken the guesswork out of cardiology...