Just looked at some of the questions and they look mostly like standard read input and spit out an optimization answer. As someone else said on Slashdot years ago, the problem with such puzzlers is they select for people who like solving complex tasks, not for people who like avoiding such tasks and like helping others avoid them (as in people full of diligently applied hard-working laziness). For a company like Google that supposedly prides itself on making easy to use software, this would seem to indicate they generally are hiring the wrong sort of person (as much as the world and/or Google needs some great algorithm designers and implementers). What about the skills to know what is a good question to ask? Of course, our entire mainstream pipeline of schooling engineers and scientists has that sort of problem...
Related by the then Vice-Provost of Caltech, David Goodstein: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
See also: http://books.google.com/books/... "In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. "The Difference" is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
"The Difference" reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences f
Getting enough sleep is also important of good health. Try to avoid looking at screens a couple hours before going to bed. And before going to sleep, try to make a mental list of all the things that you would still want to be there in the morning and that you are thankful for (e.g. enough to eat that day, water to drink that day, a safe place to sleep, garbage collection services, etc.), as gratitude helps mental health, and what you think about before going to sleep often programs the subconscious mind as to what to think about.
A lot of people creating startups and working long hours may ending up eating poorly, not exercising, and not getting enough sunlight for vitamin D. So they are at risk.
Deeper issues in the sense that we live in a crazy-making society with many organizations emphasizing unhealthy aspirations, even celebrated ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/read...
Typos: "What we need if more and deeper" should be "What we need is more and deeper". "learning technical school" should be "learning technical skills"
And I should have been clearer that is was the same James McDonnell who created both the foundation and the aerospace company, not that the foundation itself is owned or controlled by the company.
https://www.princeton.edu/~pea... "The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality."
Disclaimer: I worked in a joint program with them when I was managing the PU robotics lab in the 1980s. The program was funded in part by the McDonnell Foundation (of McDonnell-Douglas) in part because supposedly strange unexplainable things happened in fighter cockpits especially to pilots under stress in emergency situations. Rather that give the money just to the PEAR lab, it was decided to give the money to a group of labs that would work together somehow exploring aspects of human consciousness (or something like that, not saying how effective all that was). Dean Radin is the researcher who connected the groups back then and has been active in parapsychology work since: http://www.deanradin.com/
Related items at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell) which include mention of Dean Radin and Charles Tart: http://www.noetic.org/search/?...
Mainstream science has been apparently useful, even if it is more the tinkerers and engineers who actually invent and bring to production useful things. But ultimately, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit we don't very much understand the nature of consciousness or the deeper nature of reality, which together, as much as we think we know about them, still form a "great mystery" (a term some Native Americans used for God and such). And, no, mapping a few or even many neural pathways or having a chemical analysis of brain neuro-transmitters does not equate to understanding the mystery of consciousness. As Charles Tart points out, there is a step where many otherwise good scientists move from apparently solid ground in their specialties to claiming fallacious things like "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" and so create essentially a new religion of "Scientistic Materialism". http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/a... "His [Tart's] and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientistic, materialist philosophy of our times, masquerading as genuine science, dogmatically denies any possible reality to the spiritual. This hurts people, it pressures them to reject vital aspects of their being."
Anyway, mass compulsory schooling in "classrooms" (intended by 1920s eugenicists to segregate people by social class so they interbreed and stratify, see Gatto) is also in general another way of hurting people: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com... "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.... Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility an
Ac wrote: "A handful of successful children from a single stable marriage require far more effort than the half dozen kids from various failed relationships who, because they never experienced stability in their home life, will go out and and repeat the behaviour seen in their parents, the latter approach also tends to ensure a better spread of genes, breeding occurring at a younger age when fewer complications are likely to occur and fewer genetic defects are likely to arise. Being successful and a good person is great, but it's not necessarily the best strategy for passing on one's genes, i suspect that in reality that accolade goes to being scum, living in council flats and breeding like rabbits, sadly."
Way too much insightful truth in this.:-) See also R-selection vs. K-selection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... "In ecology, r/K selection theory relates to the selection of combinations of traits in a species that inversely relate parental investment and the quantity and quality of offspring. Each selection seems to promote success in different environments. r-selection species spread parental investment across many offspring whereas K-selected species focus theirs on a few. Neither mode of propagation is intrinsically superior, and they can coexist in the same habitat; e.g., rodents and elephants."
And also some New Yorker or Atlantic article a year or so ago that said, why are people surprised when someone like Bill Clinton or any other successful powerful politician "throws away his career for some fling" when to some extent that is in some sense the whole point evolutionary of amassing power?
All that said, humans have memes as well as genes, and so our behavior also has a moral component with collective social consequences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... "Nunez descends into the valley and finds an unusual village with windowless houses and a network of paths, all bordered by curbs. Upon discovering that everyone is blind, Nunez begins reciting to himself the refrain, "In the Country of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King". He realises that he can teach and rule them, but the villagers have no concept of sight, and do not understand his attempts to explain this fifth sense to them. Frustrated, Nunez becomes angry, but the villagers calm him, and he reluctantly submits to their way of life, because returning to the outside world seems impossible.
Nunez is assigned to work for a villager named Yacob. He becomes attracted to Yacob's youngest daughter, Medina-Sarote. Nunez and Medina-Sarote soon fall in love with one another, and having won her confidence, Nunez slowly starts trying to explain sight to her. Medina-Sarote, however, simply dismisses it as his imagination. When Nunez asks for her hand in marriage, he is turned down by the village elders on account of his "unstable" obsession with "sight". The village doctor suggests that Nunez's eyes be removed, claiming that they are diseased and are affecting his brain. Nunez reluctantly consents to the operation because of his love for Medina-Sarote. However, at sunrise on the day of the operation, while all the villagers are asleep, Nunez, the failed King of the Blind, sets off for the mountains (without provisions or equipment), hoping to find a passage to the outside world, and escape the valley."
While I loved the cartoon version of "A Connectuct Yankeee in King Arthur's Court", plus similar stories ("Lest Darkness Fall" etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... and even "Coneheads"), in practice, it seems that being significantly different in cultural outlook from a backwards society can be a huge handicap leading to isolation (e.g. "Stranger in a Strange Land" or the religious story Doug Adams called being nailed to a tree 2000 years ago for suggesting people might try being nice to each other).
Another take on all that: http://www.fromthewilderness.c... "Start building your lifeboats where you are now. I can see that the lessons I have learned here are important whether you arethinking of moving from city to countryside, state to state, or nation to nation. Whatever shortcomings you may think exist where you live are far outnumbered by the advantages you have where you are a part of an existing ecosystem that you know and which knows you. If the time comes when it is necessary to leave that community you will be better off moving with your tribe rather than moving alone."
What did brilliance in the end get Tesla? Or Semmelweis? Or Shelton? Or Gatto? or CH Douglas? Or Charles Fourier? Or even Galileo? Or Dee Hock founder of Visa and the Chaordic Commons or Michael Philips founder of MasterCard? Or Theodore Sturgeon and "The Skills of Xanadu"? Or Doug Engelbart and "The Mother of All Demos" and the mouse? Or even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others with the increasingly forgotten-but-continually-badly-re-invented Smalltalk (e.g. Ruby & Java & many others)? See on Kay in particular: https://www.google.com/search?...
How many of them have most people even heard of? Yet they provided many of the better ideas that shape our lives today. There are many other mostly forgotten people we could add to that list, even if there may be some small subgroup of fans at some point in time. And the people I list are even on the upper end of the scale as at least having been recognized as mostly ignored or forgotten despite being brilliant, unlike legions of other people who have contributed to society such as those who bred potatoes or apples or r
"As somebody who's going back to college, I'm really surprised to see how big the "ADD generation" is. They're everywhere, they can't focus, and they have a million ideas at once. I always thought the ADD craze you mentioned was bullshit too, but being around younger people I can see they are considerably different from the people I worked with back when I got my first degree. It really was a night and day difference when switching from being around thirty-somethings to twenty-somethings."
So, always on smartphones full of interesting content are just like sugar-laden donuts -- killing you with a seeming treadmill of pleasure that totally displaces other less-fun-or-pleasurable-in-the-short-term behaviors and nutrients needed for well-rounded health and success.
To the extent gluten free helps, I wonder if it may be because it also usually avoids a lot of mainstream junk like foods with artificial colors and flavors that can create general problems? What might just make some other kid a bit cranky or a bit hyper might push some other kid past some meltdown threshold. So, excellent diet (e.g. Dr. Fuhrman, Dr. Hyman) help take away at least some potential problems which autism is going to possibly amplify.
But yes, practical behavioral interventions can make a big difference. One aspect of autism is too many connections in the brain relative to other kids where the neural connections die off in the womb or in the first years. So, what may seem to come more naturally to other kids regarding social norms has to be more explicitly learned. There is some software and books for leaning about facial expressions, for example.
Also perhaps of help are homeshooling/unschooling and free schools that can be more accommodating of strong focus.
That said, there are other factors besides sunlight and poor diet (esp. junk food additives etc.) as well as other odd factors like too much vitamin A relative to vitamin D in supplements. Society was more formally structured (with "manners") decades ago, which made it easier to navigate for people on the autistic spectrum. Kids were allowed to be kids a lot more. Mothers spent more time with young kids (including working from home together on farms) rather than farming young kids out to day care and preschool all day. And so on. http://www.thewaronkids.com/ http://www.chrismercogliano.co...
Even without DNA manipulation or 3D printing, AI and robotics are rapidly taking us "where no one has gone before". Although, that perhaps ignores slave holding elites throughout the ages, although slaves still had to be managed and could easily revolt?
In many ways, I consider Amazon to be a lot like a 3D printer -- just a very slow one that takes a couple days to print almost anything. Except I don't have that many replication ration units compared to a post-scarcity society, so I still have to make hard choices, plus I feel bad that many people in society can't access the Amazon replicators, which reduces my enjoyment plus makes society a riskier place to be. And I can't easily unprint stuff when I am done with it or want to store it.
With enough energy (such as from LENR someday perhaps, or hot fusion, massive solar, or thorium otherwise), almost everything become easy to recycle or clean up, like via huge mass spectrometers used to separate different atoms. http://www.freeenergytimes.com... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... "The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion is a 1998 book by American author Ken Wilber. It reasons that by adopting contemplative (e.g. meditative) disciplines related to Spirit and commissioning them within a context of broad science, that "the spiritual, subjective world of ancient wisdom" could be joined "with the objective, empirical world of modern knowledge". The text further contends that integrating science and religion in this way would in turn, "have political dimensions sewn into its very fabric"."
The mystery of consciousness (where it come from, what it means if anything, where is goes, how it changes, and so on) remains a fundamental unknown and maybe unknowable of our lives on this plane of existence. The uncertainty ranges across all sorts of religious ideas to also include things like whether we are living in a computer simulation or computer game of some sort. That mystery is intertwined with the great mystery of everything.
Both links above are Wikipedia links to show Wikipedia can be useful as a starting point, if you go to it aware of its limits including expecting bias. Here is another example of an article on economics which it seems to me is being aggressively policed for years by a "deletionist" who won't let anything but pro-mainstream-Capitalist economics be on the page regardless of whether the other material includes a citation from a notable published source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
To avoid being misled by Wikipedia, especially on health issues or economic issues, one must be aware that Wikipedia does suffer from some sort of mainstream bias most areas. Looking at past versions of the pages or related discussion can sometimes help overcome those biases. Example including a recent edit war of reversions in the last month or two: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
One alternative to Wikipedia was Google Knol. Aside from being owned by a for-profit with a history of abandoning projects, there was something good to the now-defunct Google Knol with the notion of articles from a point-of-view authored by either one person, a small group, or everyone. Peer review is a form of censorship (several essays on on it on the web), PhD training produces "Disciplined Minds" (the name of an enlightening book), and peer review is getting more problematical with increased competition for funding (see Dr. David Goodstein on "The Big Crunch"),
More on the important of discussion by Hugo Mercier: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.... "We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not
Of course, that goes for most indoor workers in general, from lack of direct sunlight. But it might be a bit more extreme for those working underground, who might be less likely to take lunch breaks up in the sunlight.
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
http://www.thecaseagainsthomew... "Bavo to Bennett and Kalish for having the courage to say what many of us know to be true! By connecting the dots in new ways, they make a strong case against the value of homework. This book serves as an indispensable tool for parents who want to get serious about changing homework practices in their schools."
As someone pushing 50, programming since my teens, I have to agree with this, and maybe to generalize, older programmers should also pursue embedded systems jobs in such companies, since an older programmer probably has a lot of related experience working on constrained systems and dealing with low-level custom protocols and such. I did a job search starting in early 2011 after several years as a (part-time) stay-at-home dad (not good on a resume to most employers), while also doing a couple Android apps (not much sales), some paying programming projects for my wife's consulting work, various free and open source stuff (including Python, Java, JavaScript, and CouchDB/NoSQL), and a bunch of (unpaid) writing about technology and society. It took about nine months of looking to land a position after sending out 100+ resumes, working my way down from dream jobs (e.g. Willow Garage telecommuting) to just about anything as our finances dwindled. We've generally only worked for others when we ran out of cash and credit to fund our own free and open source stuff, and my wife's consulting work had hit a dry patch with the recession, and apps I wrote were not selling well, and making money of my writing somehow did not look promising. I thought about trying to make a go of selling software as a service, but it just seemed too risky.
It was a tough search given the Great Recession then. Ultimately I got a contracting job at a big ancient-by-internet-terms broadcaster supporting internally-developed broadcast infrastructure software that has been in use for over fifteen years. It is a sort of soft-real-time embedded system requiring extremely high reliability with possibly million dollar costs for seconds of downtime (like affecting commercials during sporting events). Unlike your father's example, adjusted for inflation, the pay is much less than I used to make in my early 30s doing Smalltalk (the hot technology then). But, I did not have to move for a contract as I did then, and I can work mostly from home, so that's a big perk as far as contracting jobs go. There is a significantly older developer than me on the overall project, plus a couple highly experienced managers older than me. In general, I'm very thankful for the job, and the people I work with are nice, and the work itself is challenging in an interesting way (if you like the puzzle of making sense of the work of dozens of programmers of various styles and levels of competency over more than a decade in multiple languages implementing a complex task).
I can see though that as a programmer I am slowing down in some areas (even if I have other strengths). As someone who has spent decades always being the best overall developer around, this is the first project I've been on that I've had to admit to myself there are better programmers on the team than me in many respects. That is a bit of a blow to my ego.
It's also the kind of position I probably would not have stayed in or done well in in my 20s or 30s, including because the emphasis is more on reliability than innovation. Reliability at first glance is boring, but it still has its own more subtle creative challenges both technically and socially, and there can still be a lot to learn and do. For example, ironically one of my big "value-added" efforts was getting people to agree to get rid of a somewhat-unreliable recently-added component to the system by helping find the root cause of the problem the additional complexity was supposed to fix (but ultimately didn't). When I was younger, I would have been more likely to have tried to get the extra complexity to work instead of spending months navigating the social and technical landscape needed to remove it. How do you measure "programmer productivity" when the end result is making a system more reliable by getting rid of an expensive piece of custom hardware and software which sounded like a good idea at the time? I'm inspired in this in part by Andy Hertzfeld's essay about Bill Atkinson and "-2000 Lines Of Code":
Good points on dreams, and disappointments, and continuing hopes.
Here are some rambles of my own thoughts and experiences with OLPC and an independent software developer long interested in education (my wife and I made a free garden simulator in the 1990s).
I got two OLPs via the G1-G1 program. One never even made it out of the box, sadly. (I think of donating them somewhere sometimes, thinking it is better a kid has it than it becomes an unused collector's item.) I made a demo version of some of our plant growth software under Sugar and ported to Python, but did not take it much further. The code is here: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
As I see it, the OLPC project shot itself int the foot unfortunately, especially with Sugar. (I've done that to myself enough times, so I know.:-) Sugar was a great idea, and still is, but it was just too much of a stretch and not especially central to the overall OLPC goal. The push to Sugar also just underestimated how fast kids can learn -- contrast with the Hole in The Wall project. As others have said, it would have been better to just get a plain Linux system running Debian and a standard window manager into kids' hands on a low-end ruggedized laptop. Sugar may have had innovative ideas, but it was a real stumbling block, Also not choosing ARM was another stumble. Dumbing down the browser was another stumble, Also promoting Python on low-end hardware was another stumble, as much as I've liked Python; Java or just C would have been a better choice. Or instead of Sugar, just all Squeak on Forth and ditching the OS would have at least been a more innovative plan and improved performance and understandability by ditching Linux. The keyboard also is a problem of usability and reliability. One of the USB ports on the machine we used stopped working quickly, and I can't see how they would really be waterproof anyway. Sugar was also a distraction form finding and organizing existing educational software and content, another stumble. (I know a separate foundation started to do free content for the OLPC, not sure where it went.) Not understanding that a village of often related people works together and could have a networked central facility (with one computer per child who wanted to use it, plus cheap usb storage fobs) is another cultural stumble. It's easy to say with 20/20 hindsight the OLPC group should have know these things as with all after-the-fact comments, but I won't let them off that easily, because people did point such things out from the start, and also you'd expect the team to have some expertise in education and culture and system design. These point to some sort of dysfunctional social process that must have been going on with early decision making.
What it mostly came down to as far as my involvement was that as a developer, why should I make an educational app specific for Sugar to reach an audience of a million (or whatever), going up a painful bleeding edge learning curve dealing with buggy ever-changing Sugar infrastructure, when I can potentially reach an audience of a billion or more writing a JavaScript-powered web app or just a plain cross-platform Linux/Mac/Win app like with Java or C/C++ or even Squeak? And knowing Moore's law means whatever I write now of bigger platforms will be accessible more cheaply in five or ten years? Even as a volunteer, the value proposition is weak.
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline"." From Marcia Angell: http://www.nybooks.com/article...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine." From the Atlantic from a few years ago:
"The Kept University" http://www.theatlantic.com/pas...
"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies..." Also from the Atlantic, just recently:
"Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science" http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science." ---
Or where US medicine began to go greatly wrong a century ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... "When Flexner researched his report, "modern" medicine faced vigorous competition from several quarters, including osteopathic medicine, chiropractic medicine, electrotherapy, eclectic medicine, naturopathy and homeopathy.[11] Flexner clearly doubted the scientific validity of all forms of medicine other than that based on scientific research, deeming any approach to medicine that did not advocate the use of treatments such as vaccines to prevent and cure illness as tantamount to quackery and charlatanism. Medical schools that offered training in various disciplines including electromagnetic field therapy, phototherapy, eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, naturopathy, and homeopathy, were told either to drop these courses from their curriculum or lose their accreditation and underwriting support. A few schools resisted for a time, but eventually all complied with the Report or shut their doors."
Article has been gutted somewhat like many Wikipedia medicine articles. It used to have stuff on how women and minorities had also been disenfranchised by that takeover, so that only rich white guys who could afford college could practice medicine.
Anyway, I may not agree 100% with all your points, an
which have helped with her own ASD kid (whether vaccines played a role or not): http://www.generationrescue.or... "5. Explore an Allergen Free Diet Improvement has been seen with the removal of certain allergens such as gluten, casein, or soy from the diet. Explore a variety of special diets, including the gluten-free, casein-free diet and other allergen free diets through the following resources: Explore the the gluten-free, casein-free diet Body ecology diet Elimination diet Rotation diet Other allergen free diet 6. Consider Supplementation with multi-vitamins and other beneficial nutritional support Multi-vitamins and multi-minerals Probiotics Digestive enzymes Fish oils MB12 Natural detoxifiers Anti-virals Anti-fungals Anti-yeasts"
The kind of studies you ask for in humans would generally be considered unethical. Even if ethical, they are expensive, and such results don't profit drug companies, so they are rare. So, in humans, we are left with small "gold standard" double-blind controlled studies and larger observational epidemiological studies. A lot of infectious disease were already greatly reduced through improved sanitation, handwashing, quarantine, and better nutrition and lifestyle/behavioral choices (such as not drinking from a common cup and bucket of water on a train as once was common) as well as some curative medicines (antibiotics, phage therapy, etc.) before vaccines came along.
However, I challenge you to supply the same sorts of studies you request for all the specific current formulations of vaccines currently in use today. If you look for such studies in animals, you may find at least some popular vaccines do not work as well as you might think. For example, consider: http://news.sciencemag.org/hea... "The current vaccine for whooping cough, or pertussis, may keep you or your baby healthy, but it may not stop either of you from spreading the disease, a new animal study suggests. Baboons can harbor and spread the disease even after receiving the vaccine, researchers have found.... As expected, the unvaccinated baboons developed severe whooping cough, while the baboons that had been sick previously remained well, the research team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Both groups of vaccinated animals also remained healthy. However, the germ persisted an average of 35 days in the throats of baboons vaccinated with the acellular shot, though it grew less thickly than it did in the throats of the sick, unvaccinated animals. Baboons vaccinated with the whole-cell shot harbored the germ for 18 days, and it did not grow at all in animals that previously had recovered from pertussis."
Note that the baboons that actually had the disease did not pass it on, unlike those who had been vaccinated. Vaccine-based immunity fades fairly quickly for pertussis. It is possible that when people get whooping cough as older children or adults (when it is more manageable) and nursing mothers pass that immunity on to their infants, there may be less mortality among infants from the disease. One problem with many vaccines is that since they fade quickly, you need life-long booster shots, which for dozens of disease could add up potentially to thousands of shots over a lifetime -- each one with a risk of being a mis-manufactured "hot lot" or being mis-injected or being worthless because the disease evolved. Even if each shot may seem to make sense, the total cost for the individual and society of getting on the treadmill of artificial immunity may be quite high. For example, consider the lifetime burden of aluminum from 100 or so annual flu shots.
Of the related research easy to find on exercise and nutrition and disease transmission, here are a few of them:
http://www.ucdenver.edu/academ... "Children with poor nutrition are at increased risk of pneumonia. In many tropical settings seasonal pneumonia epidemics occur during the rainy season, which is often a period of poor nutrition. We have investigated whether seasonal hunger may be a driver of seasonal pneumonia epidemics in children in the tropical setting of the Philippines. In individual level cohort analysis, infant size and growth were both associated with increased pneumonia admissions, consistent with findings from previous studies. A low weight for age z-score in early infancy was associated with an increased risk of pneumonia admission
Sorry to hear about your co-worker's loss. Still: http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/dis... "Until relatively recently, only a few caught whooping cough, with less than 150 cases being reported in children aged four and under during 2007. Since then cases had been climbing steadily, until the large outbreak outlined above, which affected countries across the world, including USA and Australia. As to why the 2012 outbreak occurred in this way, opinion at the time of writing is divided. It is possible that the bacteria causing the infection has changed in some way. Conversely, the HPA has conjectured that years of tight control over whooping cough may have led to people's immune systems not being boosted by repeat infections in adulthood, therefore leaving the population as a whole at increased risk."
And also: http://www.vaccinationcouncil.... "Prior to vaccination, infants were less susceptible to pertussis because real "herd immunity" was in place, and mothers were passing on immunity to their infants during the vulnerable time. Since vaccination, this herd immunity has actually been abolished, and infants are now more susceptible due to their vaccinated or non-immune mothers lacking specific antibody and cellular immunity for pertussis. This can be verified in the medical literature:
"Diminishing maternal immunity increases the risk of infection among the youngest age groups, who have not yet received at least two doses of the vaccine."[3]
When pertussis is left to take its normal course in the community, the supposedly vulnerable infants that the vaccinationists scream and yell about, are protected by maternal antibodies and mother's milk until they are old enough to process the disease on their own. After vaccines were introduced, this protection was vastly reduced, because the mothers were at best, having vaccine antibodies to pass along to their infants, and that defense is neither effective nor long-lasting. The reason for the diminishing maternal immunity is that vaccinated individuals tend to have lower antibody titers long-term, and breast milk antibody (IgA) is not transferred in vaccinated mothers. As we already know, two doses and even three doses of vaccine is far from a guarantee of immunity. In fact that is the exact reason there is a new vaccine in the pipeline to add to the current FAILED pertussis vaccine schedule. This new vaccine will be inhaled, and in this article [4] touting the need for the new vaccine, the authors detail the many problems with the current vaccine...."
It's too late to do anything for your co-worker's family, but to prevent such tragedies in the future to others, one might ask (rhetorically, not to the real person): * was the child breastfed from birth? * Was the mother vaccinated against pertussis and so had no natural immunity to pass on via breastmilk? * did they have a home birth and avoid doctors offices and hospitals which spread disease? * was the mother eating a great diet? * did both mother and child get adequate sunlight or vitamin D? * Did both get enough iodine? * DId other vaccines like HepB at birth weaken the infant? * DId compulsory work and compulsory schooling practices force the family to be exposed to more diseases (compared to a basic income and homeschooling/unschooling)? * Did anyone in the family eat junk food, especially with a lot of sugar? * Were family members getting enough sleep and exercise and laughter (all immune boosters)? * And so on for other aspects of optimum health, like Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about in "Disease-proof your Child": http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/...
If your co-worker was at all a typical US American, the answers to most of these questions would be unhea
Probably the highest usefulness-to-cost ratio of any computer I've purchased, given it only cost only about $250 and is so low maintenance and light weight (and relatively droppable).
I still like a recent MacBook Pro better though for the bigger screen and better keyboard (including backlit) and better trackpad, as well as the ability to run Eclipse and some other software etc.. But for many people, the extra $1000 or more would not be worth it.
I enjoy the Chromebook immensely more that a Win 8 laptop that has been very frustrating to use, which every time I turn it on nags me with updates and other notices and long reboot cycles and such and just endless clutter getting in the way of actually just using it -- all while not doing much to mitigate security risks from downloads the way a web browser can mitigate risks from loading a web page.
And in a few years, with improvements in web tools including native code compilation within sandboxed zones, the convenience factor of something like the Chromebook will continue to improve. Meanwhile, both Windows and Mac OS seem to be devolving into harder to use systems.
Maybe you should check again: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline... "Exercise not only helps your immune system fight off simple bacterial and viral infections, it decreases your chances of developing heart disease, osteoporosis, and cancer."
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH... ""Nutrition plays an important part in maintaining immune function," explains George L. Blackburn, M.D., Ph.D., associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. "Insufficiency in one or more essential nutrients may prevent the immune system from functioning at its peak.""
People with weaker immune systems are more likely to contract diseases and have them for longer and so spread them around more.
So, again, now that you know this, why not lock up those who eat junk food and who don't exercise, or force them at gunpoint to eat vegetables and do push ups? Such people otherwise pose a health risk to everyone else. That is a fact based on what people at the NIH and Harvard have said.
Many things make contracting and spreading disease more likely (poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, lack of vitamin D, lack of iodine, lack of nursing, sending kids to public school, going into a shared workplace every day, etc.). Why do you call at least some of those "an individual choice that does not affect the well-being of others" when clearly they all increase the risk of disease transmission? All of these choices affect the well-being of those around us. What of the immuno-compromised child who is going to die because your kid spread around the flu contracted in part by vitamin D deficiency, too much sugar, and not enough exercise?
Also, the fact is, vaccinations at best only protect to some degree against catching specific disease. These other things protect against catching almost any disease whether there is a vaccine for it or not. If forcing people to get vaccinated against their will for the public good is a good idea, why not force people to do these other things too?
For example, since people who eat poorly have a greater risk of contracting almost any communicable illness and spreading it around, why allow people to pick what food they want to eat each day for example? Clearly a government appointed dietitian (backed by gun-wielding police) would do a better job of deciding what you should eat each day than you could and thus do a better job of protecting the public health against widespread illness, injury, and death, right? Likewise for those who do not exercise enough. Cops should force people to exercise at gunpoint if needed, right? No less than the NIH and Harvard provide the supporting evidence,
Not laughing enough also is bad for you immune system. http://www.mayoclinic.org/heal... "Negative thoughts manifest into chemical reactions that can affect your body by bringing more stress into your system and decreasing your immunity. In contrast, positive thoughts actually release neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more-serious illnesses."
So, people who do not laugh enough are a health risk to those around them. It would seem then that people thus have no constitutional right to be dour sour pusses, since that puts everyone around them at health risk. So, why not set up a police force who force people to laugh by watching funny websites? Or do laughter yoga? And otherwise incarcerate them if they don't comply?
Although, like anything, I guess that could go too far:
Slashdot Mirror
Just looked at some of the questions and they look mostly like standard read input and spit out an optimization answer. As someone else said on Slashdot years ago, the problem with such puzzlers is they select for people who like solving complex tasks, not for people who like avoiding such tasks and like helping others avoid them (as in people full of diligently applied hard-working laziness). For a company like Google that supposedly prides itself on making easy to use software, this would seem to indicate they generally are hiring the wrong sort of person (as much as the world and/or Google needs some great algorithm designers and implementers). What about the skills to know what is a good question to ask? Of course, our entire mainstream pipeline of schooling engineers and scientists has that sort of problem...
Related by the then Vice-Provost of Caltech, David Goodstein:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
See also: http://books.google.com/books/...
"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. "The Difference" is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
"The Difference" reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences f
Yes, you are right. I should have said "was", as MD merged with Boeing in 1997.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
These can sometimes help. A collection of health links I put together:
https://www.changemakers.com/d...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Laughter can help too. http://www.humorproject.com/
Medically-supervised fasting can also help sometimes. http://www.healthpromoting.com...
Better nutrition implies avoiding various problematical food additives. http://fedup.com.au/factsheets...
Getting enough sleep is also important of good health. Try to avoid looking at screens a couple hours before going to bed. And before going to sleep, try to make a mental list of all the things that you would still want to be there in the morning and that you are thankful for (e.g. enough to eat that day, water to drink that day, a safe place to sleep, garbage collection services, etc.), as gratitude helps mental health, and what you think about before going to sleep often programs the subconscious mind as to what to think about.
A lot of people creating startups and working long hours may ending up eating poorly, not exercising, and not getting enough sunlight for vitamin D. So they are at risk.
Deeper issues in the sense that we live in a crazy-making society with many organizations emphasizing unhealthy aspirations, even celebrated ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/read...
Good luck!
Typos:
"What we need if more and deeper" should be "What we need is more and deeper".
"learning technical school" should be "learning technical skills"
And I should have been clearer that is was the same James McDonnell who created both the foundation and the aerospace company, not that the foundation itself is owned or controlled by the company.
https://www.princeton.edu/~pea...
"The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality."
Disclaimer: I worked in a joint program with them when I was managing the PU robotics lab in the 1980s. The program was funded in part by the McDonnell Foundation (of McDonnell-Douglas) in part because supposedly strange unexplainable things happened in fighter cockpits especially to pilots under stress in emergency situations. Rather that give the money just to the PEAR lab, it was decided to give the money to a group of labs that would work together somehow exploring aspects of human consciousness (or something like that, not saying how effective all that was). Dean Radin is the researcher who connected the groups back then and has been active in parapsychology work since: http://www.deanradin.com/
Another person active in this field of consciousness studies is Charles Tart (unrelated to PU, but interesting in the field).
http://www.paradigm-sys.com/
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/...
Related items at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell) which include mention of Dean Radin and Charles Tart:
http://www.noetic.org/search/?...
Mainstream science has been apparently useful, even if it is more the tinkerers and engineers who actually invent and bring to production useful things. But ultimately, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit we don't very much understand the nature of consciousness or the deeper nature of reality, which together, as much as we think we know about them, still form a "great mystery" (a term some Native Americans used for God and such). And, no, mapping a few or even many neural pathways or having a chemical analysis of brain neuro-transmitters does not equate to understanding the mystery of consciousness. As Charles Tart points out, there is a step where many otherwise good scientists move from apparently solid ground in their specialties to claiming fallacious things like "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" and so create essentially a new religion of "Scientistic Materialism".
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/a...
"His [Tart's] and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientistic, materialist philosophy of our times, masquerading as genuine science, dogmatically denies any possible reality to the spiritual. This hurts people, it pressures them to reject vital aspects of their being."
Anyway, mass compulsory schooling in "classrooms" (intended by 1920s eugenicists to segregate people by social class so they interbreed and stratify, see Gatto) is also in general another way of hurting people: ... Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility an
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.
Ac wrote: "A handful of successful children from a single stable marriage require far more effort than the half dozen kids from various failed relationships who, because they never experienced stability in their home life, will go out and and repeat the behaviour seen in their parents, the latter approach also tends to ensure a better spread of genes, breeding occurring at a younger age when fewer complications are likely to occur and fewer genetic defects are likely to arise. Being successful and a good person is great, but it's not necessarily the best strategy for passing on one's genes, i suspect that in reality that accolade goes to being scum, living in council flats and breeding like rabbits, sadly."
Way too much insightful truth in this. :-) See also R-selection vs. K-selection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
"In ecology, r/K selection theory relates to the selection of combinations of traits in a species that inversely relate parental investment and the quantity and quality of offspring. Each selection seems to promote success in different environments. r-selection species spread parental investment across many offspring whereas K-selected species focus theirs on a few. Neither mode of propagation is intrinsically superior, and they can coexist in the same habitat; e.g., rodents and elephants."
And also some New Yorker or Atlantic article a year or so ago that said, why are people surprised when someone like Bill Clinton or any other successful powerful politician "throws away his career for some fling" when to some extent that is in some sense the whole point evolutionary of amassing power?
All that said, humans have memes as well as genes, and so our behavior also has a moral component with collective social consequences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Nunez descends into the valley and finds an unusual village with windowless houses and a network of paths, all bordered by curbs. Upon discovering that everyone is blind, Nunez begins reciting to himself the refrain, "In the Country of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King". He realises that he can teach and rule them, but the villagers have no concept of sight, and do not understand his attempts to explain this fifth sense to them. Frustrated, Nunez becomes angry, but the villagers calm him, and he reluctantly submits to their way of life, because returning to the outside world seems impossible.
Nunez is assigned to work for a villager named Yacob. He becomes attracted to Yacob's youngest daughter, Medina-Sarote. Nunez and Medina-Sarote soon fall in love with one another, and having won her confidence, Nunez slowly starts trying to explain sight to her. Medina-Sarote, however, simply dismisses it as his imagination. When Nunez asks for her hand in marriage, he is turned down by the village elders on account of his "unstable" obsession with "sight". The village doctor suggests that Nunez's eyes be removed, claiming that they are diseased and are affecting his brain. Nunez reluctantly consents to the operation because of his love for Medina-Sarote. However, at sunrise on the day of the operation, while all the villagers are asleep, Nunez, the failed King of the Blind, sets off for the mountains (without provisions or equipment), hoping to find a passage to the outside world, and escape the valley."
While I loved the cartoon version of "A Connectuct Yankeee in King Arthur's Court", plus similar stories ("Lest Darkness Fall" etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... and even "Coneheads"), in practice, it seems that being significantly different in cultural outlook from a backwards society can be a huge handicap leading to isolation (e.g. "Stranger in a Strange Land" or the religious story Doug Adams called being nailed to a tree 2000 years ago for suggesting people might try being nice to each other).
Another take on all that:
http://www.fromthewilderness.c...
"Start building your lifeboats where you are now. I can see that the lessons I have learned here are important whether you arethinking of moving from city to countryside, state to state, or nation to nation. Whatever shortcomings you may think exist where you live are far outnumbered by the advantages you have where you are a part of an existing ecosystem that you know and which knows you. If the time comes when it is necessary to leave that community you will be better off moving with your tribe rather than moving alone."
What did brilliance in the end get Tesla? Or Semmelweis? Or Shelton? Or Gatto? or CH Douglas? Or Charles Fourier? Or even Galileo? Or Dee Hock founder of Visa and the Chaordic Commons or Michael Philips founder of MasterCard? Or Theodore Sturgeon and "The Skills of Xanadu"? Or Doug Engelbart and "The Mother of All Demos" and the mouse? Or even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others with the increasingly forgotten-but-continually-badly-re-invented Smalltalk (e.g. Ruby & Java & many others)? See on Kay in particular:
https://www.google.com/search?...
How many of them have most people even heard of? Yet they provided many of the better ideas that shape our lives today. There are many other mostly forgotten people we could add to that list, even if there may be some small subgroup of fans at some point in time. And the people I list are even on the upper end of the scale as at least having been recognized as mostly ignored or forgotten despite being brilliant, unlike legions of other people who have contributed to society such as those who bred potatoes or apples or r
"As somebody who's going back to college, I'm really surprised to see how big the "ADD generation" is. They're everywhere, they can't focus, and they have a million ideas at once. I always thought the ADD craze you mentioned was bullshit too, but being around younger people I can see they are considerably different from the people I worked with back when I got my first degree. It really was a night and day difference when switching from being around thirty-somethings to twenty-somethings."
Explained in part: http://www.amazon.com/Supernor...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...
So, always on smartphones full of interesting content are just like sugar-laden donuts -- killing you with a seeming treadmill of pleasure that totally displaces other less-fun-or-pleasurable-in-the-short-term behaviors and nutrients needed for well-rounded health and success.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
To the extent gluten free helps, I wonder if it may be because it also usually avoids a lot of mainstream junk like foods with artificial colors and flavors that can create general problems? What might just make some other kid a bit cranky or a bit hyper might push some other kid past some meltdown threshold. So, excellent diet (e.g. Dr. Fuhrman, Dr. Hyman) help take away at least some potential problems which autism is going to possibly amplify.
But yes, practical behavioral interventions can make a big difference. One aspect of autism is too many connections in the brain relative to other kids where the neural connections die off in the womb or in the first years. So, what may seem to come more naturally to other kids regarding social norms has to be more explicitly learned. There is some software and books for leaning about facial expressions, for example.
Also perhaps of help are homeshooling/unschooling and free schools that can be more accommodating of strong focus.
Good luck.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/1...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/chil...
That said, there are other factors besides sunlight and poor diet (esp. junk food additives etc.) as well as other odd factors like too much vitamin A relative to vitamin D in supplements. Society was more formally structured (with "manners") decades ago, which made it easier to navigate for people on the autistic spectrum. Kids were allowed to be kids a lot more. Mothers spent more time with young kids (including working from home together on farms) rather than farming young kids out to day care and preschool all day. And so on.
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.chrismercogliano.co...
Plus furniture for such "aliens" to sit on: http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Even without DNA manipulation or 3D printing, AI and robotics are rapidly taking us "where no one has gone before". Although, that perhaps ignores slave holding elites throughout the ages, although slaves still had to be managed and could easily revolt?
In many ways, I consider Amazon to be a lot like a 3D printer -- just a very slow one that takes a couple days to print almost anything. Except I don't have that many replication ration units compared to a post-scarcity society, so I still have to make hard choices, plus I feel bad that many people in society can't access the Amazon replicators, which reduces my enjoyment plus makes society a riskier place to be. And I can't easily unprint stuff when I am done with it or want to store it.
By me from a decade ago on funding to create a Star Trek society: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Practical aspects: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Political ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
Education ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
Economic ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/medi...
Others: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
With enough energy (such as from LENR someday perhaps, or hot fusion, massive solar, or thorium otherwise), almost everything become easy to recycle or clean up, like via huge mass spectrometers used to separate different atoms.
http://www.freeenergytimes.com...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Others who make related points about abundance as well as its challenges to conventional economics:
http://worldtransformed.com/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
http://www.thelightsinthetunne...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion is a 1998 book by American author Ken Wilber. It reasons that by adopting contemplative (e.g. meditative) disciplines related to Spirit and commissioning them within a context of broad science, that "the spiritual, subjective world of ancient wisdom" could be joined "with the objective, empirical world of modern knowledge". The text further contends that integrating science and religion in this way would in turn, "have political dimensions sewn into its very fabric"."
And see also stuff by Charles Tart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
The mystery of consciousness (where it come from, what it means if anything, where is goes, how it changes, and so on) remains a fundamental unknown and maybe unknowable of our lives on this plane of existence. The uncertainty ranges across all sorts of religious ideas to also include things like whether we are living in a computer simulation or computer game of some sort. That mystery is intertwined with the great mystery of everything.
Both links above are Wikipedia links to show Wikipedia can be useful as a starting point, if you go to it aware of its limits including expecting bias. Here is another example of an article on economics which it seems to me is being aggressively policed for years by a "deletionist" who won't let anything but pro-mainstream-Capitalist economics be on the page regardless of whether the other material includes a citation from a notable published source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
To avoid being misled by Wikipedia, especially on health issues or economic issues, one must be aware that Wikipedia does suffer from some sort of mainstream bias most areas. Looking at past versions of the pages or related discussion can sometimes help overcome those biases. Example including a recent edit war of reversions in the last month or two:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
One alternative to Wikipedia was Google Knol. Aside from being owned by a for-profit with a history of abandoning projects, there was something good to the now-defunct Google Knol with the notion of articles from a point-of-view authored by either one person, a small group, or everyone. Peer review is a form of censorship (several essays on on it on the web), PhD training produces "Disciplined Minds" (the name of an enlightening book), and peer review is getting more problematical with increased competition for funding (see Dr. David Goodstein on "The Big Crunch"),
Related things I've written:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
And also, on trying to think more deeply together about health and other issues:
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
http://opengov.newschallenge.o...
http://www.changemakers.com/mo...
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
More on the important of discussion by Hugo Mercier:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
"We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not
http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
Of course, that goes for most indoor workers in general, from lack of direct sunlight. But it might be a bit more extreme for those working underground, who might be less likely to take lunch breaks up in the sunlight.
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
Like Alaska does with oil and gas royalties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Otherwise it ends up being mostly another giveaway of monopoly to the wealthy who pay a small fraction of the true value ...
http://www.thecaseagainsthomew...
"Bavo to Bennett and Kalish for having the courage to say what many of us know to be true! By connecting the dots in new ways, they make a strong case against the value of homework. This book serves as an indispensable tool for parents who want to get serious about changing homework practices in their schools."
Grades are bad too:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teach...
As is compulsory schooling in general (which could be replaced by a basic income from birth so parents can hire tutors, pay for private school, go on trips, and/or homeschool/unschool):
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
As someone pushing 50, programming since my teens, I have to agree with this, and maybe to generalize, older programmers should also pursue embedded systems jobs in such companies, since an older programmer probably has a lot of related experience working on constrained systems and dealing with low-level custom protocols and such. I did a job search starting in early 2011 after several years as a (part-time) stay-at-home dad (not good on a resume to most employers), while also doing a couple Android apps (not much sales), some paying programming projects for my wife's consulting work, various free and open source stuff (including Python, Java, JavaScript, and CouchDB/NoSQL), and a bunch of (unpaid) writing about technology and society. It took about nine months of looking to land a position after sending out 100+ resumes, working my way down from dream jobs (e.g. Willow Garage telecommuting) to just about anything as our finances dwindled. We've generally only worked for others when we ran out of cash and credit to fund our own free and open source stuff, and my wife's consulting work had hit a dry patch with the recession, and apps I wrote were not selling well, and making money of my writing somehow did not look promising. I thought about trying to make a go of selling software as a service, but it just seemed too risky.
It was a tough search given the Great Recession then. Ultimately I got a contracting job at a big ancient-by-internet-terms broadcaster supporting internally-developed broadcast infrastructure software that has been in use for over fifteen years. It is a sort of soft-real-time embedded system requiring extremely high reliability with possibly million dollar costs for seconds of downtime (like affecting commercials during sporting events). Unlike your father's example, adjusted for inflation, the pay is much less than I used to make in my early 30s doing Smalltalk (the hot technology then). But, I did not have to move for a contract as I did then, and I can work mostly from home, so that's a big perk as far as contracting jobs go. There is a significantly older developer than me on the overall project, plus a couple highly experienced managers older than me. In general, I'm very thankful for the job, and the people I work with are nice, and the work itself is challenging in an interesting way (if you like the puzzle of making sense of the work of dozens of programmers of various styles and levels of competency over more than a decade in multiple languages implementing a complex task).
I can see though that as a programmer I am slowing down in some areas (even if I have other strengths). As someone who has spent decades always being the best overall developer around, this is the first project I've been on that I've had to admit to myself there are better programmers on the team than me in many respects. That is a bit of a blow to my ego.
It's also the kind of position I probably would not have stayed in or done well in in my 20s or 30s, including because the emphasis is more on reliability than innovation. Reliability at first glance is boring, but it still has its own more subtle creative challenges both technically and socially, and there can still be a lot to learn and do. For example, ironically one of my big "value-added" efforts was getting people to agree to get rid of a somewhat-unreliable recently-added component to the system by helping find the root cause of the problem the additional complexity was supposed to fix (but ultimately didn't). When I was younger, I would have been more likely to have tried to get the extra complexity to work instead of spending months navigating the social and technical landscape needed to remove it. How do you measure "programmer productivity" when the end result is making a system more reliable by getting rid of an expensive piece of custom hardware and software which sounded like a good idea at the time? I'm inspired in this in part by Andy Hertzfeld's essay about Bill Atkinson and "-2000 Lines Of Code":
Good points on dreams, and disappointments, and continuing hopes.
Here are some rambles of my own thoughts and experiences with OLPC and an independent software developer long interested in education (my wife and I made a free garden simulator in the 1990s).
I got two OLPs via the G1-G1 program. One never even made it out of the box, sadly. (I think of donating them somewhere sometimes, thinking it is better a kid has it than it becomes an unused collector's item.) I made a demo version of some of our plant growth software under Sugar and ported to Python, but did not take it much further. The code is here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
My hopes from 2007:
https://mail.python.org/piperm...
As I see it, the OLPC project shot itself int the foot unfortunately, especially with Sugar. (I've done that to myself enough times, so I know. :-) Sugar was a great idea, and still is, but it was just too much of a stretch and not especially central to the overall OLPC goal. The push to Sugar also just underestimated how fast kids can learn -- contrast with the Hole in The Wall project. As others have said, it would have been better to just get a plain Linux system running Debian and a standard window manager into kids' hands on a low-end ruggedized laptop. Sugar may have had innovative ideas, but it was a real stumbling block, Also not choosing ARM was another stumble. Dumbing down the browser was another stumble, Also promoting Python on low-end hardware was another stumble, as much as I've liked Python; Java or just C would have been a better choice. Or instead of Sugar, just all Squeak on Forth and ditching the OS would have at least been a more innovative plan and improved performance and understandability by ditching Linux. The keyboard also is a problem of usability and reliability. One of the USB ports on the machine we used stopped working quickly, and I can't see how they would really be waterproof anyway. Sugar was also a distraction form finding and organizing existing educational software and content, another stumble. (I know a separate foundation started to do free content for the OLPC, not sure where it went.) Not understanding that a village of often related people works together and could have a networked central facility (with one computer per child who wanted to use it, plus cheap usb storage fobs) is another cultural stumble. It's easy to say with 20/20 hindsight the OLPC group should have know these things as with all after-the-fact comments, but I won't let them off that easily, because people did point such things out from the start, and also you'd expect the team to have some expertise in education and culture and system design. These point to some sort of dysfunctional social process that must have been going on with early decision making.
What it mostly came down to as far as my involvement was that as a developer, why should I make an educational app specific for Sugar to reach an audience of a million (or whatever), going up a painful bleeding edge learning curve dealing with buggy ever-changing Sugar infrastructure, when I can potentially reach an audience of a billion or more writing a JavaScript-powered web app or just a plain cross-platform Linux/Mac/Win app like with Java or C/C++ or even Squeak? And knowing Moore's law means whatever I write now of bigger platforms will be accessible more cheaply in five or ten years? Even as a volunteer, the value proposition is weak.
I wanted the OLPC project to succeed. I even used it as an example here, suggesting the world might be better off if Princeton University dissolved itself and spent the endowment on OLPCs:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
Overall, though, just JavaS
See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
----
About a book by Jeff Schmidt, a previous editor of Physics Today magazine:
http://www.disciplined-minds.c...
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline"."
From Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/article...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
From the Atlantic from a few years ago:
"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/pas...
"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies..."
Also from the Atlantic, just recently:
"Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science"
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
---
Or where US medicine began to go greatly wrong a century ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"When Flexner researched his report, "modern" medicine faced vigorous competition from several quarters, including osteopathic medicine, chiropractic medicine, electrotherapy, eclectic medicine, naturopathy and homeopathy.[11] Flexner clearly doubted the scientific validity of all forms of medicine other than that based on scientific research, deeming any approach to medicine that did not advocate the use of treatments such as vaccines to prevent and cure illness as tantamount to quackery and charlatanism. Medical schools that offered training in various disciplines including electromagnetic field therapy, phototherapy, eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, naturopathy, and homeopathy, were told either to drop these courses from their curriculum or lose their accreditation and underwriting support. A few schools resisted for a time, but eventually all complied with the Report or shut their doors."
Article has been gutted somewhat like many Wikipedia medicine articles. It used to have stuff on how women and minorities had also been disenfranchised by that takeover, so that only rich white guys who could afford college could practice medicine.
Anyway, I may not agree 100% with all your points, an
http://edge.org/conversation/h...
which have helped with her own ASD kid (whether vaccines played a role or not): http://www.generationrescue.or...
"5. Explore an Allergen Free Diet
Improvement has been seen with the removal of certain allergens such as gluten, casein, or soy from the diet. Explore a variety of special diets, including the gluten-free, casein-free diet and other allergen free diets through the following resources:
Explore the the gluten-free, casein-free diet
Body ecology diet
Elimination diet
Rotation diet
Other allergen free diet
6. Consider Supplementation with multi-vitamins and other beneficial nutritional support
Multi-vitamins and multi-minerals
Probiotics
Digestive enzymes
Fish oils
MB12
Natural detoxifiers
Anti-virals
Anti-fungals
Anti-yeasts"
See also:
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/1...
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
I agree with your point about conflict of interest, which I mention in other replies. Does look like US military personnel get little choice about orders to be vaccinated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://thinktwice.com/military...
The kind of studies you ask for in humans would generally be considered unethical. Even if ethical, they are expensive, and such results don't profit drug companies, so they are rare. So, in humans, we are left with small "gold standard" double-blind controlled studies and larger observational epidemiological studies. A lot of infectious disease were already greatly reduced through improved sanitation, handwashing, quarantine, and better nutrition and lifestyle/behavioral choices (such as not drinking from a common cup and bucket of water on a train as once was common) as well as some curative medicines (antibiotics, phage therapy, etc.) before vaccines came along.
However, I challenge you to supply the same sorts of studies you request for all the specific current formulations of vaccines currently in use today. If you look for such studies in animals, you may find at least some popular vaccines do not work as well as you might think. For example, consider: ... As expected, the unvaccinated baboons developed severe whooping cough, while the baboons that had been sick previously remained well, the research team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Both groups of vaccinated animals also remained healthy. However, the germ persisted an average of 35 days in the throats of baboons vaccinated with the acellular shot, though it grew less thickly than it did in the throats of the sick, unvaccinated animals. Baboons vaccinated with the whole-cell shot harbored the germ for 18 days, and it did not grow at all in animals that previously had recovered from pertussis."
http://news.sciencemag.org/hea...
"The current vaccine for whooping cough, or pertussis, may keep you or your baby healthy, but it may not stop either of you from spreading the disease, a new animal study suggests. Baboons can harbor and spread the disease even after receiving the vaccine, researchers have found.
Note that the baboons that actually had the disease did not pass it on, unlike those who had been vaccinated. Vaccine-based immunity fades fairly quickly for pertussis. It is possible that when people get whooping cough as older children or adults (when it is more manageable) and nursing mothers pass that immunity on to their infants, there may be less mortality among infants from the disease. One problem with many vaccines is that since they fade quickly, you need life-long booster shots, which for dozens of disease could add up potentially to thousands of shots over a lifetime -- each one with a risk of being a mis-manufactured "hot lot" or being mis-injected or being worthless because the disease evolved. Even if each shot may seem to make sense, the total cost for the individual and society of getting on the treadmill of artificial immunity may be quite high. For example, consider the lifetime burden of aluminum from 100 or so annual flu shots.
Of the related research easy to find on exercise and nutrition and disease transmission, here are a few of them:
http://www.ucdenver.edu/academ...
"Children with poor nutrition are at increased risk of pneumonia. In many tropical settings seasonal pneumonia epidemics occur during the rainy season, which is often a period of poor nutrition. We have investigated whether seasonal hunger may be a driver of seasonal pneumonia epidemics in children in the tropical setting of the Philippines. In individual level cohort analysis, infant size and growth were both associated with increased pneumonia admissions, consistent with findings from previous studies. A low weight for age z-score in early infancy was associated with an increased risk of pneumonia admission
Sorry to hear about your co-worker's loss. Still: http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/dis...
"Until relatively recently, only a few caught whooping cough, with less than 150 cases being reported in children aged four and under during 2007. Since then cases had been climbing steadily, until the large outbreak outlined above, which affected countries across the world, including USA and Australia. As to why the 2012 outbreak occurred in this way, opinion at the time of writing is divided.
It is possible that the bacteria causing the infection has changed in some way. Conversely, the HPA has conjectured that years of tight control over whooping cough may have led to people's immune systems not being boosted by repeat infections in adulthood, therefore leaving the population as a whole at increased risk."
And also: ..."
http://www.vaccinationcouncil....
"Prior to vaccination, infants were less susceptible to pertussis because real "herd immunity" was in place, and mothers were passing on immunity to their infants during the vulnerable time. Since vaccination, this herd immunity has actually been abolished, and infants are now more susceptible due to their vaccinated or non-immune mothers lacking specific antibody and cellular immunity for pertussis. This can be verified in the medical literature:
"Diminishing maternal immunity increases the risk of infection among the youngest age groups, who have not yet received at least two doses of the vaccine."[3]
When pertussis is left to take its normal course in the community, the supposedly vulnerable infants that the vaccinationists scream and yell about, are protected by maternal antibodies and mother's milk until they are old enough to process the disease on their own. After vaccines were introduced, this protection was vastly reduced, because the mothers were at best, having vaccine antibodies to pass along to their infants, and that defense is neither effective nor long-lasting. The reason for the diminishing maternal immunity is that vaccinated individuals tend to have lower antibody titers long-term, and breast milk antibody (IgA) is not transferred in vaccinated mothers. As we already know, two doses and even three doses of vaccine is far from a guarantee of immunity. In fact that is the exact reason there is a new vaccine in the pipeline to add to the current FAILED pertussis vaccine schedule. This new vaccine will be inhaled, and in this article [4] touting the need for the new vaccine, the authors detail the many problems with the current vaccine.
It's too late to do anything for your co-worker's family, but to prevent such tragedies in the future to others, one might ask (rhetorically, not to the real person):
* was the child breastfed from birth?
* Was the mother vaccinated against pertussis and so had no natural immunity to pass on via breastmilk?
* did they have a home birth and avoid doctors offices and hospitals which spread disease?
* was the mother eating a great diet?
* did both mother and child get adequate sunlight or vitamin D?
* Did both get enough iodine?
* DId other vaccines like HepB at birth weaken the infant?
* DId compulsory work and compulsory schooling practices force the family to be exposed to more diseases (compared to a basic income and homeschooling/unschooling)?
* Did anyone in the family eat junk food, especially with a lot of sugar?
* Were family members getting enough sleep and exercise and laughter (all immune boosters)?
* And so on for other aspects of optimum health, like Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about in "Disease-proof your Child":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/...
If your co-worker was at all a typical US American, the answers to most of these questions would be unhea
Probably the highest usefulness-to-cost ratio of any computer I've purchased, given it only cost only about $250 and is so low maintenance and light weight (and relatively droppable).
I still like a recent MacBook Pro better though for the bigger screen and better keyboard (including backlit) and better trackpad, as well as the ability to run Eclipse and some other software etc.. But for many people, the extra $1000 or more would not be worth it.
I enjoy the Chromebook immensely more that a Win 8 laptop that has been very frustrating to use, which every time I turn it on nags me with updates and other notices and long reboot cycles and such and just endless clutter getting in the way of actually just using it -- all while not doing much to mitigate security risks from downloads the way a web browser can mitigate risks from loading a web page.
And in a few years, with improvements in web tools including native code compilation within sandboxed zones, the convenience factor of something like the Chromebook will continue to improve. Meanwhile, both Windows and Mac OS seem to be devolving into harder to use systems.
Maybe you should check again: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline...
"Exercise not only helps your immune system fight off simple bacterial and viral infections, it decreases your chances of developing heart disease, osteoporosis, and cancer."
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH...
""Nutrition plays an important part in maintaining immune function," explains George L. Blackburn, M.D., Ph.D., associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. "Insufficiency in one or more essential nutrients may prevent the immune system from functioning at its peak.""
People with weaker immune systems are more likely to contract diseases and have them for longer and so spread them around more.
So, again, now that you know this, why not lock up those who eat junk food and who don't exercise, or force them at gunpoint to eat vegetables and do push ups? Such people otherwise pose a health risk to everyone else. That is a fact based on what people at the NIH and Harvard have said.
The same for the other things I mentioned which all affect the immune system. See also:
http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-...
Many things make contracting and spreading disease more likely (poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, lack of vitamin D, lack of iodine, lack of nursing, sending kids to public school, going into a shared workplace every day, etc.). Why do you call at least some of those "an individual choice that does not affect the well-being of others" when clearly they all increase the risk of disease transmission? All of these choices affect the well-being of those around us. What of the immuno-compromised child who is going to die because your kid spread around the flu contracted in part by vitamin D deficiency, too much sugar, and not enough exercise?
Also, the fact is, vaccinations at best only protect to some degree against catching specific disease. These other things protect against catching almost any disease whether there is a vaccine for it or not. If forcing people to get vaccinated against their will for the public good is a good idea, why not force people to do these other things too?
For example, since people who eat poorly have a greater risk of contracting almost any communicable illness and spreading it around, why allow people to pick what food they want to eat each day for example? Clearly a government appointed dietitian (backed by gun-wielding police) would do a better job of deciding what you should eat each day than you could and thus do a better job of protecting the public health against widespread illness, injury, and death, right? Likewise for those who do not exercise enough. Cops should force people to exercise at gunpoint if needed, right? No less than the NIH and Harvard provide the supporting evidence,
Not laughing enough also is bad for you immune system.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/heal...
"Negative thoughts manifest into chemical reactions that can affect your body by bringing more stress into your system and decreasing your immunity. In contrast, positive thoughts actually release neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more-serious illnesses."
So, people who do not laugh enough are a health risk to those around them. It would seem then that people thus have no constitutional right to be dour sour pusses, since that puts everyone around them at health risk. So, why not set up a police force who force people to laugh by watching funny websites? Or do laughter yoga? And otherwise incarcerate them if they don't comply?
Although, like anything, I guess that could go too far: