First of all, your initial assertion that university professors don't get training in teaching is incorrect in many cases. In many places the overlap between the "college of eduction" sorts and the other departments is considerable, with the education professors teaching lots of courses, usually the entry level ones.
And guess what? It's entirely possible for them to be the ones who suck at teaching. That was certainly the case in the department where I taught: Consistently lower student ratings and student performance for that subgroup.
Oh, and as for the non-English speaking graduate students, in a lot of places they are handling entire classes with little or no supervision. Maybe that's still a TA, but when they are the only person teaching the class and doing all the grading, it's pretty much a moot point. And it's a HUGE problem: My calculus classroom used to be SRO because poor guy teaching another section one room over spoke great Russian but almost no English at all. (I say "poor guy" because it is not his fault he was given a job he couldn't possibly do well.)
I'd actually go a bit further, and say that defining slope in the obvious geometric fashion is the better way to do it. It's not like we have a shortage of terms for the change in a car's position or whatever, e.g., "speed" or "velocity". And the more general concept is better referred to as "rate of change".
I used to teach calculus, and even at the college level the grasp students have over the relationship between what that car is doing on the road and those lines on the chalkboard is often fairly tenuous. So a good teacher spends time explaining how the things connect. When you're doing that it helps to have different words for what's on the board and whatever it is in the physical world you're talking about. And it helps if the terms you use connect naturally to the domain where they are being applied.
And as long as I'm nattering on about this, another thing I picked up on pretty quickly is what sort of explanation works best varies from one student to another. For some students geometric arguments work best. For others that's completely opaque, and they get more out of an abstract symbolic approach. There are even some that just naturally get trigonometric arguments. So when I'd do a problem talking about, say a ladder sliding down a wall, I'd typically work at least two ways and sometimes three.
Anyway, it strikes me as more than a little ironic that someone who is supposedly trying to rework curriculum to better suit student needs is so pedantic about terminology. In my experience excessive pedantry is completely at odds with effective teaching.
He's (arguably) transcribing the questions as they are asked and noting his own responses. He is not transcribing anything from a recording. This restriction is clearly intended to prevent a person who prepares a transcript from the recording at a later date from being able to reveal anything. Which is entirely reasonable, although I
suspect that in most cases it's more a matter of someone comparing the transcript made at the time with what was on the tape. (At least that's how it worked when I have given testimony. And FWIW, it's been my experience that in relatively relaxed settings like depositions stenographers appreciate it when you spell any unusual technical terms you're using.)
Also look at the subsequent section regarding secrecy, where the person giving the testimony is conspicuous by their absence.
The article in question says, "The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written in the LUA computer language.
Except that it wasn't. The Kaspersky FAQ says:
The effective Lua code part is rather small compared to the overall code. Our estimation of development ‘cost’ in Lua is over 3000 lines of code, which for an average developer should take about a month to create and debug.
Flame is 20Mb total, and a lot of that is almost certainly written in C/C++ (Lua VM, sqlite3, zlib, libbz2).
The article then says, "[Flame] was built with gamer code". Also incorrect. Lua is a general-purpose scripting language in no way specific to gaming. And I've heard nothing that says code directly related to any sort of game is part of it.
That's the last time the article mentions Lua or gaming, but no further mentions are necessary. A false connection has been made, and by hyping up the danger of Flame, e.g., the UN views it is a "significant threat", they're effectively blaming game developers through guilt by association.
The article also says, "Flame came to light when the U.N. International Telecommunications Union (which oversees cyberactivities for the body) received reports of unusual activity." The implication is Flame was responsible for the activity. Again according to Kaspersky, that's not the case. They were attempting to track down something called "Codename Wiper" that was responsible for actually deleting data when they stumbled across Flame by accident.
In contrast, the MSNBC article makes it quite clear that only part of Flame was written in Lua. It then engages in a fairly coherent discussion of why Lua might have been chosen to implement part of Flame, quoting various sources with various different takes on it. And the headline is rather obviously intended to be facetious.
So, on one hand we have a fairly coherent piece that actually tries to get into software design philosophy. And on the other, we have your typical pile of crap from Fox News.
The reason it's a win for doctors is that in our "fee for service" system they don't make much on a simple office visit, especially if they have to take the time to write a prescription. There's also ongoing overhead for prescriptions - whenever you run out of refills the pharmacy has to reauth, which takes up staff time. (This last is why the office where my son works has additional staff on hand on fridays, which is the day that everyone does their refills.) It may also reduce liability, although exactly how that will play out is harder to predict.
It's an obvious win for insurance because most OTC stuff isn't covered. And likewise for drug companies, who will sell more product, a lot of it to people who don't really need it.
The big losers will be patients. Sure, some people will have easier access to the meds they need. But costs will overall be higher, and some of the meds they are talking about aren't all that safe. Statins, for example, may be great at treating high cholesterol, but over time they can cause liver damage. Most of the antihypertensives are reasonably safe when taken at the correct dose, but take a bit too much and things like positional vertigo can occur. And as others have pointed out, the inability to track OTC meds can result in serious drug interactions or overdoses. Indeed, this is already a serious problem with acetaminenophen - so many different products contain it that it's easy to get an overdose, and boom goes your liver.
Irrespective of their quality, Da Vinci's drawings did little at the time to challenge the use of Galen's work (which was based on dissection of animals and therefore quite inaccurate). That particular bit of heavy lifting was done by Andreas Vesalius, who not only debunked Galen, but was also the first to publish a comprehensive work on anatomy (De Humani Corporis Fabrica). His work has repeatedly been found to be highly accurate, especially considering the conditions under which it was produced. An amusing side note is that it was so well regarded it was extensively pirated.
Vesalius made a lot of enemies by going against what amounted to the medical establishment of the time. After repeated challenges his critics actually resorted to the
howler that the human body must have changed (evolved?;) since Galen studied it.
Vesalius has always been a personal hero of mine - a guy who developed an interest in an an important area (anatomy), and pursued it, at great personal cost, with as much thoroughness and rigor as could be had at the time.
This was when we were remodeling. The cost was negligible compared to everything else. It's been about 2/3 full ever since, and I have never regretted it.
The thing I do regret is not running enough cable. I put two CAT-5E in each room and it isn't enough. I should have pulled 4 everywhere. I've had to add a couple of runs, and doing that after the walls are closed up is difficult and expensive.
I've found Wifi to be a poor substitute for wired. When two laptops are backing up trying to watch some video is painful.
Think about it: Cadaveric transplants often come from people who were in an accident. The time available to match the organ in such cases is not going to significantly different than if you grabbed someone off the street intending to steal their organs.
When there's plenty of time, as in the case of altruistic donations, yes, full match testing is performed. But when there's not, it isn't, and it usually works.
In any case, these days not only are transplants done with little or no MHC match (mine was only 2 out of 6), but they are even done against blood type. The process for that is fairly involved, making it impractical to do if you're going to transplant a stolen organ. That said, the odds are over 40% that a person grabbed at random in the US is going to be type O, and type O organs are blood type compatible with everyone.
Actually, end stage renal disease (ESRD) including both dialysis and transplants, is covered by Medicare regardless of age. The only other condition that enjoys this status is amyotrophic lateral schlerosis (ALS). I have no idea why ALS is handled this way, especially since there are several similar motor neurone diseases that aren't covered, but in the case of ESRD, it's because when dialysis was first developed it was extremely expensive and insurance refused to cover it. The result was few dialysis machines were built and the costs remained very high. ESRD was and is very common, so laws were passed to extend medicare to cover it. (And the costs did drop, but it's still expensive.) And when transplants became available, the coverage was extended again to cover that.
There is, however, a little gotcha in all this. The drugs needed to prevent rejection of a transplant are also expensive. And once you have a transplant, you don't have ESRD any more, so your Medicare coverage ends. This was addressed by extending the coverage for 18 months, which I guess is how long transplants used to last. But these days the average is more like 9 years. So what happens is someone gets a transplant that's paid for by Medicare, their meds are paid for for 18 months, then the coverage stops, they can't afford the meds and the transplant stops working. So they go back into ESRD and need dialysis, at which point they're covered again.
This is absolutely insane no matter how you look at it, since the meds are typically around $10K/year whereas dialysis is closer to $50K/year. So not only do you waste a precious organ, it ends up costing more.
The good news is that one of the provision of the AHA that goes into effect in 2014 is to extend medicare to cover the meds indefinitely.
Substantial risk understates the situation if anything. The fact is removing a kidney is a pretty big deal whereas putting one into someone is a lot simpler. This is because they put transplanted kidneys into the lower abdomen inside the muscle layer but outside the peritoneal wall. (The old failed or failing kidneys are only removed if absolutely necessary.) Removing a kidney, OTOH, means going through the abdomen to the other side. Even though it's done laparoscopically, it's still fairly traumatic, to the point where altruistic donors (that's what they are called) have a significantly worse time of it than the recipient in the first couple of weeks post-transplant. Because of this, there is no way in hell any remotely competent surgeon would agree to put back a kidney they are sure she doesn't need so soon after the original procedure. (Donors undergo extensive testing before such procedures. And it's actually surgeons plural, since reattaching blood vessels and hooking up ureters are actually different specialties.)
For that matter, they would not have removed the transplanted kidney from the original recipient were it not for the small matter that according to the article, it was killing him. (When a transplanted kidney fails and another transplant is done they don't remove it unless absolutely necessary, with the result that someone can end up with four or more kidneys.) So they were going to end up with a kidney and no place to put it. Rather than toss it in the garbage, my guess is they started calling people at the top of the list who were type compatible until they found one willing to give it a go.
I'll also point out that one of the side benefits of being a donor is that in the unlikely event that your remaining kidney fails, you automatically go to the top of the transplant list. And in most cases 100% of the donor's costs are paid for.
That may be true for other organs, but not kidneys. And this is for good reason: With, say, a heart or lung or liver, you either get one or you die in fairly short order. But we have an acceptable substitute for a kidney: Dialysis. So, issues of compatibility and availability aside, kidneys are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis,
What this translates to in practice is that if you're blood type O, expect a *long* wait. This is mostly because type Os can only get a type O kidney, meaning about 60% of the kidneys that show up aren't going to be compatible. (This actually isn't true - there's a therapy that allows transplants against type - but since it requires extensive preparation in advance it isn't really practical for cadaveric transplants.) It, OTOH, you're type AB, your wait time is likely to be much less, mostly because any kidney that shows up will work for you.
This approach only works if the messages continue to be sent using the same mix. Which given all the publicity this has gotten and how these sorts of crazies tend to monitor every reference they get in the media, seems very unlikely.
More specifically, they've seized one server, presumably after monitoring it for some time and capturing all the incoming messages. Now they use the private key to re-encrypt the message and look for a match among the incoming traffic. Assuming that traffic wasn't sent using a TLS mechanism with perfect forward secrecy, they now have the IP address of the next to last server in the mix. But what they don't have is any recordings of the traffic getting to that server. And unless the person sending these messages sends some more using the same mix, they will never be able to catch any.
I supppose it's possible that after monitoring the traffic, they also started monitoring traffic coming in to every host that ever sent this system mail. But I'm dubious of the practicality of that, both in the legal and technical sense.
What they should have done is use one of those handy-dandy national security letters or whatever they are called to gain access to the server in secret. They could have pried the private key loose that way, then initiated monitoring on the next server up the chain, another letter, and so on.
Of course this also falls apart if one of the servers is some place that doesn't like the US and won't honor requests from US law enforcement.
No, the correct answer is B. Mushroom vs. plant is a living thing vs. a group of living things this specific living thing isn't in. Rocks and tables aren't alive. Pizza, on the other hand, can be, if the old one I found in our refrigerator the other day is any indication.
We currently have a 2010 Prius and a 2011 Leaf. The Prius replaced a 2001 Prius that went to our son. The 2001 is getting a little long in the tooth (mostly because it's managed to be rear-ended 5 times, one of which nearly totaled the car) so the plan is to replace the 2010 Prius with a Tesla and then the 2010 Prius becomes our son's car.
But like you, I suspect our shift to EV is not in any way representative. It's just one factor among many. As you say, a lot of the tech associated with hybrids actually isn't the hybrid part and it's showing up elsewhere. Add to that the fact that the hybrid brand has been weakened by things where the hybrid part didn't really buy you that much and in some cases almost nothing - and the people who bought those are bound not to waste the extra $$$ a second time.
By not looking at the reasons why people are planning to switch, what they're planning to switch to, or even when they're planning to make the switch, the study changes from being informative to little more than a curiosity. Hell, for all we know most of them are planning to hold on to their hybrids until electrics fall in price.
That's really the question, isn't it? Depending on what you read, you'll find people claiming that it's impossible to have an allergy to iodine itself and others claiming that it is. People have severe allergies to seafood, to iodine-based contrast material, and to povidone-iodine. But others point out that being allergic to one doesn't mean you're allergic to the others - there's some correlation, but it's small. And all of them contain other stuff.
As it happens my mother was also highly allergic to shellfish. She avoided povidone-iodine so I don't know if she had an allergy to it or not. But prior to developing all these sensitivities she had hyperthyroidism, which was treated with a dose of radioactive iodine. And this was back when the treatment was first developed and the doses were larger. She tolerated that fine, if "tolerated" includes developing two different forms of cancer in the next few years. Did all this have something to do with the later sensitivities? Hell if I know.
Antibacterials like simple alcohols or hydrogen peroxide are small molecules, and small molecules can't generate an immune response directly. However, small molecules can act as haptens: They bind to some protein and the combination generates such a response. Urushiol is the best example of a hapten - it's the "active ingredient" in poison ivy, oak, and sumac.
That said, I've never heard of an allergic reaction to either a simple alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. Skin irritation, sure, but not an allergic reaction.
Iodine is another matter. Antibacterial iodine is usually povidone-iodine, and it definitely is possible to have a severe allergic reaction to it. Various sources disagree as to why this happens, but it definitely does.
It's also possible, although rare, to have an allergic reaction to iodine-based contrast dyes. My mother nearly died from an injection some of this stuff, as a matter of fact.
Re:Kidney transplants are counterexample
on
When Are You Dead?
·
· Score: 1
This stuff is incredibly expensive, but a $100 million seems excessive. As it happens I also know someone who had total renal failure when he was a kid - a bad blood transfusion not only nuked his kidneys, he also developed an inflammatory process that required his existing kidneys to be completely removed, and subsequently, when a transplant failed it also had to be removed. (Believe it or not, the norm is to leave them in. Some people end up with four or more kidneys in there.) It's been 30 years since that happened, and he's now on his fourth transplant.
Using the guy I know as an example, let's add up the costs. Let's assume he's been on dialysis 1/2 the time, at $50K/year. Let's assume he's had a working transplant 1/2 the time, at $20K a year for the meds (that's probably a little high, but this is all just spitballing). Transplant surgery runs around $150K, but in his case the removal of the kidney is more complicated and may involve additional hospitalization, so let's call it $250K. Let's also assume there were five rejection episodes per kidney requiring hospitalization, at $50K a pop. And finally, let's add $20K a year for miscellaneous ancillary medical costs - there are *lot* of those.
Add that up and he's around $4 million. That's a lot of money, but nowhere near $100 million. There has to be some other factor, like long ICU stays or much more expensive meds, to get anywhere near that sort of number.
Kidney transplants are counterexample
on
When Are You Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Back when dialysis was first perfected, the machines were extremely expensive and only rich people could afford to be treated. And since that's effectively a death sentence to the very large numbers of people in end stage renal disease (ESRD), there was a huge fuss. In the end, Medicare was extended to cover the cost of treatment for anyone with ESRD. No age restrictions, nothing.
When kidney transplants became feasible they were also covered. So the notion that you have to be rich or have excellent insurance to get a transplant is just plain wrong.
This is not to say that the system isn't borked, but that happens long after the transplant. Specifically, once you have a undergone a successful transplant you no longer have ESRD, so Medicare coverage stops. But your need for anti-rejection medication does not, and it's expensive. That's a separate thing, and the guidelines for it were set back when transplants rarely lasted for more than a few years. So the rules say that Medicare pays for the medication for 36 months, then coverage ends.
As a result a not-insignificant number of people with transplanted kidneys are forced to stop taking the necessary medication because they cannot afford it. Their transplants fail, and once that happens they're back in ESRD and on dialysis. And their Medicare coverage resumes. Oh, and did I mention that the medications are expensive, they're still significantly cheaper than dialysis? So this is truly a case of penny-wise, pound-foolish.
One final note. The coverage issue was addressed by the health care reform bill, but that particular provision doesn't kick in until 2014.
When I read a traditional book, or one on my original Kindle, it's not like I don't have an iPhone right there in my pocket capable of distracting me. In fact most a fair amount of the time I have a laptop ready and waiting for me to interact with it. Is the physical immediacy of having the distractions built into the same device, as opposed to another device that's only a foot or so away, really that big of a factor? Absent some actual, you know, data, as opposed to a collection of anecdotes (if there was any sort of study cited in the article I must have missed it), I'm extremely skeptical.
I have no control over what anyone else says or posts about me on Facebook or elsewhere, irrespective of whether or not I choose to create a page on Facebook.
In point of fact I have a Facebook page that I didn't create and have no control over. Because I wrote some RFCs I've been found to be a "public figure".
Rather, it's about achieving the sales numbers you forecast. GM projected that they would sell 10,000 Volts in 2011. At 7,671 actual sales, they were off by almost 25%. That's a fairly big miss, and the sort of thing that forces you to make some adjustments.
Contrast this to the Nissan Leaf, with projected sales of 10,000 and actual sales of 9,674.
Rather, you look at improvement during the year, and you compare that value with classrooms at the same school or schools with similar socioeconomic makeup. And you also average over several years, because the data is still too noisy otherwise.
I'll note that when the LA TImes did this analysis for a bunch of schools and published their results, they found that certain teachers consistently outperformed and others consistently underperformed. They also found that the administrators of the school, when asked who their best and worst teachers were, were no better than guessing at random.
That's weird, because Amazon Instant Video works fine on my Tivo. Their prices are often significantly lower, too. Maybe this was some time ago?
What doesn't work is Netflix streaming. Crashes the Tivo the instant there's a data underrun - probably a codec bug of some sort. I cancelled my trial Netflix subscription because of it and reported the problem, but got no useful response.
It may have been fixed by now, but I'm waiting for one of those "we want you back so here's another free trial" offers to coincide with my having
sufficient free time to try it again.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, your initial assertion that university professors don't get training in teaching is incorrect in many cases. In many places the overlap between the "college of eduction" sorts and the other departments is considerable, with the education professors teaching lots of courses, usually the entry level ones.
And guess what? It's entirely possible for them to be the ones who suck at teaching. That was certainly the case in the department where I taught: Consistently lower student ratings and student performance for that subgroup.
Oh, and as for the non-English speaking graduate students, in a lot of places they are handling entire classes with little or no supervision. Maybe that's still a TA, but when they are the only person teaching the class and doing all the grading, it's pretty much a moot point. And it's a HUGE problem: My calculus classroom used to be SRO because poor guy teaching another section one room over spoke great Russian but almost no English at all. (I say "poor guy" because it is not his fault he was given a job he couldn't possibly do well.)
I'd actually go a bit further, and say that defining slope in the obvious geometric fashion is the better way to do it. It's not like we have a shortage of terms for the change in a car's position or whatever, e.g., "speed" or "velocity". And the more general concept is better referred to as "rate of change".
I used to teach calculus, and even at the college level the grasp students have over the relationship between what that car is doing on the road and those lines on the chalkboard is often fairly tenuous. So a good teacher spends time explaining how the things connect. When you're doing that it helps to have different words for what's on the board and whatever it is in the physical world you're talking about. And it helps if the terms you use connect naturally to the domain where they are being applied.
And as long as I'm nattering on about this, another thing I picked up on pretty quickly is what sort of explanation works best varies from one student to another. For some students geometric arguments work best. For others that's completely opaque, and they get more out of an abstract symbolic approach. There are even some that just naturally get trigonometric arguments. So when I'd do a problem talking about, say a ladder sliding down a wall, I'd typically work at least two ways and sometimes three.
Anyway, it strikes me as more than a little ironic that someone who is supposedly trying to rework curriculum to better suit student needs is so pedantic about terminology. In my experience excessive pedantry is completely at odds with effective teaching.
He's (arguably) transcribing the questions as they are asked and noting his own responses. He is not transcribing anything from a recording. This restriction is clearly intended to prevent a person who prepares a transcript from the recording at a later date from being able to reveal anything. Which is entirely reasonable, although I suspect that in most cases it's more a matter of someone comparing the transcript made at the time with what was on the tape. (At least that's how it worked when I have given testimony. And FWIW, it's been my experience that in relatively relaxed settings like depositions stenographers appreciate it when you spell any unusual technical terms you're using.)
Also look at the subsequent section regarding secrecy, where the person giving the testimony is conspicuous by their absence.
Flame is 20Mb total, and a lot of that is almost certainly written in C/C++ (Lua VM, sqlite3, zlib, libbz2).
The article then says, "[Flame] was built with gamer code". Also incorrect. Lua is a general-purpose scripting language in no way specific to gaming. And I've heard nothing that says code directly related to any sort of game is part of it.
That's the last time the article mentions Lua or gaming, but no further mentions are necessary. A false connection has been made, and by hyping up the danger of Flame, e.g., the UN views it is a "significant threat", they're effectively blaming game developers through guilt by association.
The article also says, "Flame came to light when the U.N. International Telecommunications Union (which oversees cyberactivities for the body) received reports of unusual activity." The implication is Flame was responsible for the activity. Again according to Kaspersky, that's not the case. They were attempting to track down something called "Codename Wiper" that was responsible for actually deleting data when they stumbled across Flame by accident.
In contrast, the MSNBC article makes it quite clear that only part of Flame was written in Lua. It then engages in a fairly coherent discussion of why Lua might have been chosen to implement part of Flame, quoting various sources with various different takes on it. And the headline is rather obviously intended to be facetious.
So, on one hand we have a fairly coherent piece that actually tries to get into software design philosophy. And on the other, we have your typical pile of crap from Fox News.
But mostly a lose for patients.
The reason it's a win for doctors is that in our "fee for service" system they don't make much on a simple office visit, especially if they have to take the time to write a prescription. There's also ongoing overhead for prescriptions - whenever you run out of refills the pharmacy has to reauth, which takes up staff time. (This last is why the office where my son works has additional staff on hand on fridays, which is the day that everyone does their refills.) It may also reduce liability, although exactly how that will play out is harder to predict.
It's an obvious win for insurance because most OTC stuff isn't covered. And likewise for drug companies, who will sell more product, a lot of it to people who don't really need it.
The big losers will be patients. Sure, some people will have easier access to the meds they need. But costs will overall be higher, and some of the meds they are talking about aren't all that safe. Statins, for example, may be great at treating high cholesterol, but over time they can cause liver damage. Most of the antihypertensives are reasonably safe when taken at the correct dose, but take a bit too much and things like positional vertigo can occur. And as others have pointed out, the inability to track OTC meds can result in serious drug interactions or overdoses. Indeed, this is already a serious problem with acetaminenophen - so many different products contain it that it's easy to get an overdose, and boom goes your liver.
Irrespective of their quality, Da Vinci's drawings did little at the time to challenge the use of Galen's work (which was based on dissection of animals and therefore quite inaccurate). That particular bit of heavy lifting was done by Andreas Vesalius, who not only debunked Galen, but was also the first to publish a comprehensive work on anatomy (De Humani Corporis Fabrica). His work has repeatedly been found to be highly accurate, especially considering the conditions under which it was produced. An amusing side note is that it was so well regarded it was extensively pirated.
;) since Galen studied it.
Vesalius made a lot of enemies by going against what amounted to the medical establishment of the time. After repeated challenges his critics actually resorted to the howler that the human body must have changed (evolved?
Vesalius has always been a personal hero of mine - a guy who developed an interest in an an important area (anatomy), and pursued it, at great personal cost, with as much thoroughness and rigor as could be had at the time.
This was when we were remodeling. The cost was negligible compared to everything else. It's been about 2/3 full ever since, and I have never regretted it.
The thing I do regret is not running enough cable. I put two CAT-5E in each room and it isn't enough. I should have pulled 4 everywhere. I've had to add a couple of runs, and doing that after the walls are closed up is difficult and expensive.
I've found Wifi to be a poor substitute for wired. When two laptops are backing up trying to watch some video is painful.
Think about it: Cadaveric transplants often come from people who were in an accident. The time available to match the organ in such cases is not going to significantly different than if you grabbed someone off the street intending to steal their organs.
When there's plenty of time, as in the case of altruistic donations, yes, full match testing is performed. But when there's not, it isn't, and it usually works.
In any case, these days not only are transplants done with little or no MHC match (mine was only 2 out of 6), but they are even done against blood type. The process for that is fairly involved, making it impractical to do if you're going to transplant a stolen organ. That said, the odds are over 40% that a person grabbed at random in the US is going to be type O, and type O organs are blood type compatible with everyone.
Actually, end stage renal disease (ESRD) including both dialysis and transplants, is covered by Medicare regardless of age. The only other condition that enjoys this status is amyotrophic lateral schlerosis (ALS). I have no idea why ALS is handled this way, especially since there are several similar motor neurone diseases that aren't covered, but in the case of ESRD, it's because when dialysis was first developed it was extremely expensive and insurance refused to cover it. The result was few dialysis machines were built and the costs remained very high. ESRD was and is very common, so laws were passed to extend medicare to cover it. (And the costs did drop, but it's still expensive.) And when transplants became available, the coverage was extended again to cover that.
There is, however, a little gotcha in all this. The drugs needed to prevent rejection of a transplant are also expensive. And once you have a transplant, you don't have ESRD any more, so your Medicare coverage ends. This was addressed by extending the coverage for 18 months, which I guess is how long transplants used to last. But these days the average is more like 9 years. So what happens is someone gets a transplant that's paid for by Medicare, their meds are paid for for 18 months, then the coverage stops, they can't afford the meds and the transplant stops working. So they go back into ESRD and need dialysis, at which point they're covered again.
This is absolutely insane no matter how you look at it, since the meds are typically around $10K/year whereas dialysis is closer to $50K/year. So not only do you waste a precious organ, it ends up costing more.
The good news is that one of the provision of the AHA that goes into effect in 2014 is to extend medicare to cover the meds indefinitely.
Substantial risk understates the situation if anything. The fact is removing a kidney is a pretty big deal whereas putting one into someone is a lot simpler. This is because they put transplanted kidneys into the lower abdomen inside the muscle layer but outside the peritoneal wall. (The old failed or failing kidneys are only removed if absolutely necessary.) Removing a kidney, OTOH, means going through the abdomen to the other side. Even though it's done laparoscopically, it's still fairly traumatic, to the point where altruistic donors (that's what they are called) have a significantly worse time of it than the recipient in the first couple of weeks post-transplant. Because of this, there is no way in hell any remotely competent surgeon would agree to put back a kidney they are sure she doesn't need so soon after the original procedure. (Donors undergo extensive testing before such procedures. And it's actually surgeons plural, since reattaching blood vessels and hooking up ureters are actually different specialties.)
For that matter, they would not have removed the transplanted kidney from the original recipient were it not for the small matter that according to the article, it was killing him. (When a transplanted kidney fails and another transplant is done they don't remove it unless absolutely necessary, with the result that someone can end up with four or more kidneys.) So they were going to end up with a kidney and no place to put it. Rather than toss it in the garbage, my guess is they started calling people at the top of the list who were type compatible until they found one willing to give it a go.
I'll also point out that one of the side benefits of being a donor is that in the unlikely event that your remaining kidney fails, you automatically go to the top of the transplant list. And in most cases 100% of the donor's costs are paid for.
That may be true for other organs, but not kidneys. And this is for good reason: With, say, a heart or lung or liver, you either get one or you die in fairly short order. But we have an acceptable substitute for a kidney: Dialysis. So, issues of compatibility and availability aside, kidneys are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis,
What this translates to in practice is that if you're blood type O, expect a *long* wait. This is mostly because type Os can only get a type O kidney, meaning about 60% of the kidneys that show up aren't going to be compatible. (This actually isn't true - there's a therapy that allows transplants against type - but since it requires extensive preparation in advance it isn't really practical for cadaveric transplants.) It, OTOH, you're type AB, your wait time is likely to be much less, mostly because any kidney that shows up will work for you.
This approach only works if the messages continue to be sent using the same mix. Which given all the publicity this has gotten and how these sorts of crazies tend to monitor every reference they get in the media, seems very unlikely.
More specifically, they've seized one server, presumably after monitoring it for some time and capturing all the incoming messages. Now they use the private key to re-encrypt the message and look for a match among the incoming traffic. Assuming that traffic wasn't sent using a TLS mechanism with perfect forward secrecy, they now have the IP address of the next to last server in the mix. But what they don't have is any recordings of the traffic getting to that server. And unless the person sending these messages sends some more using the same mix, they will never be able to catch any.
I supppose it's possible that after monitoring the traffic, they also started monitoring traffic coming in to every host that ever sent this system mail. But I'm dubious of the practicality of that, both in the legal and technical sense.
What they should have done is use one of those handy-dandy national security letters or whatever they are called to gain access to the server in secret. They could have pried the private key loose that way, then initiated monitoring on the next server up the chain, another letter, and so on.
Of course this also falls apart if one of the servers is some place that doesn't like the US and won't honor requests from US law enforcement.
No, the correct answer is B. Mushroom vs. plant is a living thing vs. a group of living things this specific living thing isn't in. Rocks and tables aren't alive. Pizza, on the other hand, can be, if the old one I found in our refrigerator the other day is any indication.
We currently have a 2010 Prius and a 2011 Leaf. The Prius replaced a 2001 Prius that went to our son. The 2001 is getting a little long in the tooth (mostly because it's managed to be rear-ended 5 times, one of which nearly totaled the car) so the plan is to replace the 2010 Prius with a Tesla and then the 2010 Prius becomes our son's car.
But like you, I suspect our shift to EV is not in any way representative. It's just one factor among many. As you say, a lot of the tech associated with hybrids actually isn't the hybrid part and it's showing up elsewhere. Add to that the fact that the hybrid brand has been weakened by things where the hybrid part didn't really buy you that much and in some cases almost nothing - and the people who bought those are bound not to waste the extra $$$ a second time.
By not looking at the reasons why people are planning to switch, what they're planning to switch to, or even when they're planning to make the switch, the study changes from being informative to little more than a curiosity. Hell, for all we know most of them are planning to hold on to their hybrids until electrics fall in price.
Um, when an innocent person gets convicted doesn't that also mean the actual guilty party got away with it?
That's really the question, isn't it? Depending on what you read, you'll find people claiming that it's impossible to have an allergy to iodine itself and others claiming that it is. People have severe allergies to seafood, to iodine-based contrast material, and to povidone-iodine. But others point out that being allergic to one doesn't mean you're allergic to the others - there's some correlation, but it's small. And all of them contain other stuff.
As it happens my mother was also highly allergic to shellfish. She avoided povidone-iodine so I don't know if she had an allergy to it or not. But prior to developing all these sensitivities she had hyperthyroidism, which was treated with a dose of radioactive iodine. And this was back when the treatment was first developed and the doses were larger. She tolerated that fine, if "tolerated" includes developing two different forms of cancer in the next few years. Did all this have something to do with the later sensitivities? Hell if I know.
Antibacterials like simple alcohols or hydrogen peroxide are small molecules, and small molecules can't generate an immune response directly. However, small molecules can act as haptens: They bind to some protein and the combination generates such a response. Urushiol is the best example of a hapten - it's the "active ingredient" in poison ivy, oak, and sumac.
That said, I've never heard of an allergic reaction to either a simple alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. Skin irritation, sure, but not an allergic reaction.
Iodine is another matter. Antibacterial iodine is usually povidone-iodine, and it definitely is possible to have a severe allergic reaction to it. Various sources disagree as to why this happens, but it definitely does.
It's also possible, although rare, to have an allergic reaction to iodine-based contrast dyes. My mother nearly died from an injection some of this stuff, as a matter of fact.
This stuff is incredibly expensive, but a $100 million seems excessive. As it happens I also know someone who had total renal failure when he was a kid - a bad blood transfusion not only nuked his kidneys, he also developed an inflammatory process that required his existing kidneys to be completely removed, and subsequently, when a transplant failed it also had to be removed. (Believe it or not, the norm is to leave them in. Some people end up with four or more kidneys in there.) It's been 30 years since that happened, and he's now on his fourth transplant.
Using the guy I know as an example, let's add up the costs. Let's assume he's been on dialysis 1/2 the time, at $50K/year. Let's assume he's had a working transplant 1/2 the time, at $20K a year for the meds (that's probably a little high, but this is all just spitballing). Transplant surgery runs around $150K, but in his case the removal of the kidney is more complicated and may involve additional hospitalization, so let's call it $250K. Let's also assume there were five rejection episodes per kidney requiring hospitalization, at $50K a pop. And finally, let's add $20K a year for miscellaneous ancillary medical costs - there are *lot* of those.
Add that up and he's around $4 million. That's a lot of money, but nowhere near $100 million. There has to be some other factor, like long ICU stays or much more expensive meds, to get anywhere near that sort of number.
Back when dialysis was first perfected, the machines were extremely expensive and only rich people could afford to be treated. And since that's effectively a death sentence to the very large numbers of people in end stage renal disease (ESRD), there was a huge fuss. In the end, Medicare was extended to cover the cost of treatment for anyone with ESRD. No age restrictions, nothing.
When kidney transplants became feasible they were also covered. So the notion that you have to be rich or have excellent insurance to get a transplant is just plain wrong.
This is not to say that the system isn't borked, but that happens long after the transplant. Specifically, once you have a undergone a successful transplant you no longer have ESRD, so Medicare coverage stops. But your need for anti-rejection medication does not, and it's expensive. That's a separate thing, and the guidelines for it were set back when transplants rarely lasted for more than a few years. So the rules say that Medicare pays for the medication for 36 months, then coverage ends.
As a result a not-insignificant number of people with transplanted kidneys are forced to stop taking the necessary medication because they cannot afford it. Their transplants fail, and once that happens they're back in ESRD and on dialysis. And their Medicare coverage resumes. Oh, and did I mention that the medications are expensive, they're still significantly cheaper than dialysis? So this is truly a case of penny-wise, pound-foolish.
One final note. The coverage issue was addressed by the health care reform bill, but that particular provision doesn't kick in until 2014.
When I read a traditional book, or one on my original Kindle, it's not like I don't have an iPhone right there in my pocket capable of distracting me. In fact most a fair amount of the time I have a laptop ready and waiting for me to interact with it. Is the physical immediacy of having the distractions built into the same device, as opposed to another device that's only a foot or so away, really that big of a factor? Absent some actual, you know, data, as opposed to a collection of anecdotes (if there was any sort of study cited in the article I must have missed it), I'm extremely skeptical.
I have no control over what anyone else says or posts about me on Facebook or elsewhere, irrespective of whether or not I choose to create a page on Facebook.
In point of fact I have a Facebook page that I didn't create and have no control over. Because I wrote some RFCs I've been found to be a "public figure".
Rather, it's about achieving the sales numbers you forecast. GM projected that they would sell 10,000 Volts in 2011. At 7,671 actual sales, they were off by almost 25%. That's a fairly big miss, and the sort of thing that forces you to make some adjustments.
Contrast this to the Nissan Leaf, with projected sales of 10,000 and actual sales of 9,674.
Rather, you look at improvement during the year, and you compare that value with classrooms at the same school or schools with similar socioeconomic makeup. And you also average over several years, because the data is still too noisy otherwise.
I'll note that when the LA TImes did this analysis for a bunch of schools and published their results, they found that certain teachers consistently outperformed and others consistently underperformed. They also found that the administrators of the school, when asked who their best and worst teachers were, were no better than guessing at random.
Ah. Didn't even know such things existed. I have Amazon Prime (no-brainer given how much it saves on shipping); guess I'm just not "prime" enough.
That's weird, because Amazon Instant Video works fine on my Tivo. Their prices are often significantly lower, too. Maybe this was some time ago?
What doesn't work is Netflix streaming. Crashes the Tivo the instant there's a data underrun - probably a codec bug of some sort. I cancelled my trial Netflix subscription because of it and reported the problem, but got no useful response.
It may have been fixed by now, but I'm waiting for one of those "we want you back so here's another free trial" offers to coincide with my having sufficient free time to try it again.