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Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton: "Programming Will Make You a Better Doctor"
cylonlover writes "After a handful of days of furtive suggestion, spring made its presence felt in London today, where the second Technology Frontiers conference got underway. The Economist-organized event sees leading technologists and cultural figures take to the podium in front of some 250 ideas-thirsty business persons. Among them was Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton, who extolled the benefits of learning to program for all professions. He went into some detail as to the inception of the Raspberry Pi and the need for more computer programmers."
I'm a doctor, not a programmer!
Raspberry Guy: "Programming will make you a better doctor."
You green blooded, inhuman...
-Doctor, my kid is sick!
-Have you tried turning him off and on again?
You can just download Python and learn to program just fine with that. I don't need a piece of hardware for that.
Solving problems (programming) can help improve problem solving skills.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
will make you a better lawyer.
(Someone else's) Programming Will Make You a Better Doctor
Enough said.
Twoddle... I am a doctor, and a programmer. Doctoring involves lots of repetitive tasks, the problem being that individuals are... individual and you have to tweak the process slightly every time. This involves intelligence, and means that many medical tasks that should on the face of it be easy to automate, aren't.
There are lots of doctor-led initiatives out there. For example, when I refer patients to a famous cardiology center I have to fill in an online form and specifying lots of details such as how long it is since they had chest pain and the results of particular tests for an MI. The problem is that my patients may have a different diagnosis - e.g. endocarditis - so I am forced to make details up to make the computer accept the referral, then call the person who gets a printout of the referral form in order to tell them which details are invented. I might also want to tell them some test results that the computer didn't ask for. Another program sometimes swaps patient details - e.g. if you start work on a letter, then look up another patient's results, then return to the letter, the second patient's details are shown at the top of the letter. Ouch. Then sometimes you want to discharge patients home directly from intensive care. Not frequently, but it happens. It's not something that the computer allows for and you have to admit them to a regular ward (at least electronically) before sending them home.
There are also real concerns with liability and permissions... A few years back I wrote a program to help us copy patient's blood results from the results program to our patient lists (basic medical summaries of all our patients in Word). This saved us about 2-3 man hours a day and was a huge relief as the previous team had been averaging about 5 hours unpaid overtime each for a team of 3. I had to write the program in Excel because I didn't have access to a suitable programming language on the hospital systems and I wouldn't have gotten anything homebrew installed. However, even had I been able to use a program of my choice, it's unlikely that I would have been allowed/able to access the confidential results database directly which is what would have been necessary in order for me to further improve my program. When I returned to do a locum shift in that hospital a year later, I found to my delight and horror that every team in the hospital was now using my program. A few versions were corrupted by people who didn't understand it and it was now behaving slightly erratically. What is my liability should something go wrong in the future? It was something I considered at the time, but the temptation of going home earlier was too great.
There is huge opportunity for computerisation to streamline healthcare, but in general it is done very poorly and I do not know how long it will be before the systems help more than they hinder. I have just moved to a stone-age hospital where we use paper almost exclusively. Despite being an old-school nerd able to program in assembly language, C, Matlab and a bit of Java in my free time, it's a huge relief to be able to use computers less at work.
God fucking damnit Slashdot, please stop running stupid fucking pointless articles about Raspberry Pi and Bitcoin.
I swear, some days I feel like starting my own nerd-news aggregator, calling it dashpipe, and rejecting every subject overhyped by Slashdot's corporate masters.
I miss the old days.
If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
If all you have is a computer, the most flexible device you can configure, attached to the largest database of human information, every problem looks like a breeze.
No, life is more interesting when the characters get obsessed. Preferably to a totally insane, dramatic degree.
.. everything starts to look like a nail.
A few years ago I got to do program reviews in local high school in Rhode Island. In one class they were learning the Microsoft Office suite.
All fine and good, but on that particular day they were working in Excel. The teacher had them doing a payroll spreadsheet. Ok, that works. But then the teacher mentioned the cheat sheet to get the tax amounts.
Based on that I asked the teacher if there was any intention to teach these kids Visual BASIC for Applications (VBA). The teachers answer was that you needed advanced math to be able to program a computer. I wrote this on my report and said that it would actually benefit the kids understanding of mathematics if they knew how to program in MS Office apps. I also said that the act of programming would actually enhance their mathematics skills. Let's face it, for most programming the math you need is to know the basic four functions, maybe modulo, E notation, and exponents. Pretty basic stuff.
So start getting these RasPi boards out there - start getting kids interested in programming on them. You might be surprised what you get out the other end of a project like this.
Programmers are much better at making decisions based on evidenced based medicine than people.
People are much better at inducing the placebo effect though.
http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-helps-doctors-fight-cancer/240148236
Not happening.
I can only assume that most Computer Science degrees include a large amount of Scientology-style brainwashing as to how fucking amazing you are for being on that course in the first place.
That's actually not true. Lawyers, like programmers, learn how to analyze complex systems that require interaction in specialized language, and learn the precise uses of the specialized language necessary to produce desired results.
Lawyers -- far more than programmers -- also are required to learn quite a bit about ethical codes of when it is and isn't right to use particular invocations from their craft.
Sure, there is unethical lawyering, and it can be quite disproportionately visible. But the same is true of programming. Its not like malware, despite the biological analogies often made for it ("worms", "viruses", "infections") is a naturally occurring threat.