Slashdot Mirror
A Beautiful Mind and Broken Body For Silicon Valley
pacopico writes "About 30 years ago, a young Marine and math savant named Ramona Pierson was out for a run when she got hit by a drunk driver and had her body shattered. As Businessweek reports, Pierson ended up in coma for 18 months, came out blind and emaciated and was sent to live in an old folks home. Her remarkable story takes off from there to include bike racing through Russia, a PhD in neuroscience, a stint fixing Seattle's public schools, and now Declara, a social network run by Pierson and funded by billioniare Peter Thiel, who put the original money into Facebook. One of the more original start-up tales to have ever come out of Silicon Valley or really anywhere."
Just what the world needs!
Exactly.
I'm handicapped and I'm kind of pissed that someone would use a terrible accident/recovery as marketing leverage.
Look, I'm happy someone was able to get their life together and do Great Things, but those great things should not be defined by the ordeals overcome to produce them, rather the greatness they already must possess.
A one in a million feel good story!
That's great!
What about the other 999,999 whose lives are shattered and get buried in medical bills - no, the settlements from lawsuits (if you win) come nowhere CLOSE to paying all the medical bills. Don't forget kids, these are LIFETIME problems; requiring LIFETIME medical care and many times live in caretakers. A shitty couple of million dollars doesn't cut it. Medical care is extremely expensive!
These feel good stories are nice and everything but they leave unrealistic expectations in others who've experienced the same thing and give the impression to the general public that "it's no big deal".
The media - ALL the media - is incompetent.
Hopefully it won't star Russell Crowe as Ramona.
It sounds like LinkedIn on steroids. It pretty much does the linking for you.
Actually, based on my understanding, it's not for you. Or me. Or most people here. It's really for HR types, and recruiters, and managers, and such looking to solve their problem of finding the right person for the right job. The manager defines the job needed doing, and the system finds the people that would be the best fit for it.
It's something along those lines anyway.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I'm not sure how I really feel about the Declara product, and there are a lot of things that makes me nervous (like anything that is even loosely related to the bill and melinda gate fundation).
But I can't understand the negativity in the comments, I find the story very interesting and inspiring, in one way I guess Ms Pierson was lucky that she had a veteran's insurance plan, probably if she had had just a little bit more money she would have tried to keep here liberty and would not have joined the marines, and would probably have been unable to fight her way into relative health. (she joined more than 10 years before the "don't ask don't tell" policy, so she had to totally hide here sexuality).
But apparently the most important part of her recovery was her will to live, and here capacity to use her brain constructivelly even when severely incapacitated.
So maybe declara will be an useful tool, or not, but the path to recovery is definitivelly remarkable, and tends to show that it is worthwhile for the society as a whole to "invest" into makeing people get better...
And to be honest she and her girlfriend are kind of hot, and about my age, a pity I've got no chance ;-) (wrong gender and wrong continent among other weaknesses ...)
Ms Pierson graduated from USFCA in 2003 (http://www.usfca.edu/uploadedFiles/Destinations/Office_and_Services/Alumni/PNW_Alumni_Invite.pdf). Her Linkedin profile says so as well. However, her Linkedin profile does not list any PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University or Palo Alto University, nor can I find any reference to such PhD on either university's site or in citations (in particular, here are all the graduates with PhD in neuroscience from Stanford: http://nsp2.stanford.edu/alumni/)
There are a few other facts in the story that I find inconsistent but we'll leave these on the writer's conscience - it's a feel-good story of overcoming adversity, and there is a natural inclination to emphasize certain things.
Just saying...
so how is your second ph.d coming along?
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
A female marine, 30 years ago?
Some _weeks_ ago, August 16th, this year, the document "Assignment of Women in Combat Units" was released, stating that finally they will allow women to take the training, _next_ year.
Perhaps she was a marine biologist, like George Costanza?
but those great things should not be defined by the ordeals overcome to produce them, rather the greatness they already must possess.
I think winning a silver medal in the masters cycling world championships, getting a PhD in Neurosciences from Stanford, and founding several successful startups have pretty much proved she has done exceptional things regardless of any additional challenges she had to overcome.
And please cite examples of where she is *using* an accident for marketing leverage (and some journalist wanting to interview her does not qualify) before making those stupid accusations...
Are you fucking kidding me? Just because women have not been in infantry does not mean they have not been in the marines, or in combat zones. I have met a few female marines who were stationed in Afghanistan and/or Iraq as medics, helicopter mechanics, etc - and there are others who are pilots, doctors, drivers, comm operators, what have you. Besides, they already said in TFA she was an analyst/programmer. Doesn't mean she didn't go through basic training, and in fact TFA also says she was nominated for "fittest on base".
I'm pretty sure most female marines could kick your ass inside of 10 seconds (one who served with my coworker is actually a top MMA fighter, so it would probably be more like 5 seconds in her case).
Sorry all, but I have a need to vent my spleen about people who insist on habitually running near roads, it's fucking stupid.
First up, you are breathing heavily the toxic fumes output by cars. You are doing your excercise next to moving vehicle which even when travelling at 60 kph (40mph) is roughly the same as falling from a four storey building. Everytime you run near a road you are placing your trust in some random stranger where you don't know if they are competant, drunk, sick, distracted, fatigued or just plain make a mistake whilst you are wearing headphones and placing your life in someone elses hands. Is it really worth it?
I witnessed the height of this stupidity whilst driving home from the gym at night I saw a man, running for exercise, dress all in black in the pouring rain through roadworks where all the street lights were not working - wearing fucking headphones. This is not exercise, this is idiocracy. Zero for sensibility!
Now don't get me wrong, running is a great exercise and builds an iron will, but for fuck sake joggers, there are perfectly good parks, trails, beaches and even bicycle lanes you can use to run on where there is none of the above dangers from cars. Sure, you may wish to take yourself out of the genepool by tramatising someone just trying to get home but FOR FUCK SAKE please, please, please if you are going for a run have some fucking situational awareness.
rant concluded.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.