>From:    [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Iams Food
>Are ferrets being used to produce these product?
 
Ferrets are not an ingredient in Iams food.  Nor are ferrets are not used
as laborers in the manufacture of Iams food.
 
>From:    [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: zen sez
>In what way does computer simulation effect products?  How are estimates
>arrived at?
>
>Debbie
>
>[Moderator's note: I can't see how a response to that question could be
>ferret-related.  Of course, IF it is, I will post it.  BIG]
 
Wow!  That is a challenge!  But since Debbie asked a question that followed
on from another... Bill will answer this one... First to all, remember the
ferret and the human can both be infected by the same influenza and cold
virii.  Second to geeks in the know, I tried to bring this to a somewhat
understandable level.  I've tried to explain what I'm doing in matlab to
simulate a simple pseudo-square wave to simulate the signalling between
two pieces of telecommunication equipment and how a 1% flucuation in the
frequency of that wave can affect the calculations and well... I'll wave
my hands and oversimplify - if you can do better please, take over...
 
First the second question:
Debbie, you may be a wonderful owner of ferrets but there is no way I could
expect to explain probability and statistics to you in the FML.  You need
to read some rather thick and complex math books.  "Stats" is important in
many fields and is often the course that breaks down folks interested in
careers.  It knocked some folks I knew from school right out of the psych
department.
 
But the first question can be answered from the ferret owners point of
view.  Some folks want to remove all animal testing from all products.
One of the claims is that computer simulations can replace all uses of
ferrets in testing.  That is utterly ridiculous.  Being someone who writes
simulations I understand that a computer simulation has to have rules to
follow.  The rules are based on previously observed and measured data.  A
simulation for testing a new influenza (BTW there is no diarrhea in real
influenza would take all previously observed data and incorporate that as
rules for predicting the minutia of the system.  The computer would crunch
all of the minutia to calculate the long term and larger effects from
combinations of the smaller effects.  A computer doesn't mind doing the
billions of tiny little caluculations of how particular chemicals might
react when introduced together as a new medicine.  People would have
trouble getting all those caluclations done (remember its probably
billions of calculations!).
 
Now this is all fine and well with knowing how ferrets lungs, other organs
and tissues react with known chemicals.  BUT its only predictive of new
combinations.  There is no way to know if the simulation was correctly
written until the actual chemicals in that combination are actually
introduced into real live ferrets.
 
But worse for predictive simulations, there is no way to write rules for
simulations for truly new medical ideas.  A ferrets body is much to complex
to actually write a complete simulation.  Not all checmicals or compounds
have been previously tested so truly new breakthrough discoveries will be
of things that are so out of the norm that no rules could be written.
 
Ferret lungs are enough like human lungs that they are in effect a
simulation.  That is the whole point of animal testing.  Remember that
point of billions of calculations, the ferret simulation of human lungs
is a biological analog computer.  It does the calculations faster and/or
in more precisely in real time and also more accurately than ANY digital
computer could.  The ferret lung model of the human lung can predict what
might happen in the first human trials.
 
Now what this means is that computer simulation is not a science that can
replace the better ferret simulation.  Guess what?  It never will
completely.
 
But the good side is also there.  Computers are cheaper then living ferrets
for testing and there is the most important benefit - THEY CAN'T DIE!
Okay, computers break but that is an inanimate object do its not death no
matter how much some of us anthropomorphize our computers.  So what
computers can do is do some predictive simulations that might just save
some ferret lives.  If the computer simulations go badly and its not
something that can be blamed on bad engineering of the simulation then
the animal testing won't happen.
 
bill and diane
--
bill and diane killian
zen and the art of ferrets
http://www.zenferret.com/
mailto:[log in to unmask]
[Posted in FML issue 2994]