This student seems both cocky and clueless in equal measures. Fingerprints are not one of a kind, it’s a very useful method as they rarely repeat exactly but they do so are not used in isolation but rather as part of a case.

I’m not sure why he’s going on about different fingers on the same person being similar but not the same, that’s known and kind of irrelevant, you can’t convict someone with “your fingerprints are kind of similar to this one” without further convincing evidence.

Haha, I’m loving the idea of an inbred orca cult. I’ve always secretly thought the southern residents aren’t the smartest.

But yes, very much not a fan of assigning human morals to animals. They don’t think like us.

A cetacean expert I know calls it the magical orca effect. People think they’re like unicorns prancing about on rainbows. They’re quite scary, you can’t attribute malice to an animal but some of the things they do are quite brutal.

Quokka! They eat leaves, they have no idea about predators so are incredibly trusting and keep their babies in little pouches.

Almost all research is done by companies. New advances in science cost money, they need funding. Some of this funding comes from charities, but the majority comes from companies that hope to benefit in some way.

It is exactly that.

God no, only paranoia and doom allowed.

People are getting very confused here. You can allow your anonymised data to be used for research. This is not new whatsoever and it’s done by consent.

What IS new is that a company (GSK) are about to start using this data. Data that’s publicly used already. This may help them to develop some new treatments.

Different company. There’s a site called Gedmatch where you can upload your file and one of the feature you can choose to use is to allow your file be used to identify does or solve serious crimes. Nobody is doing this secretly.

Were they of the idea that when you tick the “my data can be used anonymously for research” box it meant that their data WOULDN’T be used anonymously for research?

If “operant conditioning” makes you think of dog training, you’re right.

This isn’t the bad part. Operant conditioning is how all behaviours are formed, if something gives a positive feeling or takes away a bad one the behaviour increases, if it adds negative feeling or takes away a positive one the behaviour decreases.

The issue with ABA is firstly trying to take a persons personhood away, teaching someone that who they are is bad, and secondly the mad schedules they impose. It might be that a person doesn’t feel comfortable with eye contact, the ideal situation is we go “cool, don’t do that” and everyone is just cool with it, a middle ground that is a good idea is to help the person get used to using intermittent eye contact or using little tricks like looking at someones nose or forehead. The ABA solution is we force the person to make eye contact for an hour a day, regardless of comfort, and witholding a comfort item, like a tablet, until they have completed that hour. It’s treating a child (or sometimes an adult) as a non-entity, just an issue that needs to be fixed, needs to be ‘normal’.

The zanzibar leopard is a good one. Quite pretty too. Millers Grizzled Languar is another.