I remember when Napster emerged everybody said how Shawn Fanning was a genius, and that this was a game-changing product, even though the application itself was not original (numerous p2p clients at the time, and this was bogged by use of a central indexing server, and music-specific.) The whole thing IIRC was in a visual-basic type language.
I am sad that his business ventures are going south, but it is a competitive industry, and frankly, not too hard to see the huge risk in this. They were not first on the line to the (legit) online music industry, nor did they get enough partnerships. Ability to code up a small VB / AJAX website does not make you a genius.
>I remember reading a rather stunning article a while back (would have had to have been 5+ years to be honest) >when there was some random manufactured scandal about the Clintons taking money from a Chinese company, or >somesuch. Well, a well known magazine at the time decided to run a cover with the Clintons and 1 or 2 other >people all in "Chinese-face" -- their faces done up in a over the top parody of Asian facial structure stereotypes >(exaggerated slanted eyes, sunken cheeks, etc)... And no one even took a second thought about how, this, you know, could be considered offensive.
Please -- if you are going to make outlandish claims like this at least research the facts a bit. "Random manufactured scandal?"
Anyhow, the article / cartoon in question was from "The National Review" in 1997, and they got a HUGE amount of backlash from this cartoon. I was in college at the time and there were NUMEROUS protests about this at the time. I would hope the shock was not limited to Harvard, and from talking to my friends at the time, it was not. here is a link. With a webserach, I'm sure you could find the original cartoon. As I recall, there were many protests at other colleges too, and it received quite a bit of coverage in the mainstream media.
Your post is simply too exaggerated and sensationalist... I agree there are pockets of America that remain very intolerant, but this is not speaking for all, or I would claim, not even the majority!
From the link: The website only gives users the option of "deactivating." However, once an account has been deactivated, all the personal information of users remain on Facebook's servers in case in the future they wish to reactivate. The website provides no means for users to permanently delete their account.
This, to me, is reason enough to not use the site.
Exactly - every doctor learned this back in medical school; atropine is a temporary fix (anti-cholinergic) and pralidoxime allows regeneration of AChesterase to some degree so your body can naturally remove it. It's a little bit of a juggling act, and needs monitoring for levels. Most (civilian) MDs see something like this with pesticide spray (farmer inadvertently sticks his hand in liquid "nerve gas" organophosphate bug spray, etc.) not chemical attacks, but we all get training in this (standard emergency medicine situation).
The new drug is also an oxime -- you can look at the compound and it "looks" like two pralidoxime molecules joined together with a short linking segment (compare this to this. The goal is potency -- I've never personally injected pralidoxime, but I understand its effects on regeneration are limited.
Interestingly enough, in the otherwise healthy individual atropine would "just" cause your heartrate to skyrocket. If I were Nick Cage in that scene, I would go ahead and inject it into a vein, not the heart. Intra-cardiac injection can be used, but only as a last, last resort (e.g. the person is about to go unconscious, they are the only ones who can deliver the medication, no IV to use / no way to reliably otherwise introduce the drug, etc. etc.) It makes for dramatic movie moments, though!
I'm a researching physician -- You did not take your own points to the logical conclusion:
A great deal (almost all) research has an NIH component of funding. Thus, if the bill goes through, *all journals will open their access* rather than have the scientists publish in lesser known journals, which will instantly become prestigious. The only articles that a 'closed' journal could publish would be those from industry or private/semiprivate funding sources (e.g. HHMI).
This is an indirect way of forcing open access to journals, which is a *great* thing.
Many journals have already opened up archive access. For instance, the New England Journal of Medicine http://nejm.org/ has its archive with free access, and also releases "important" or widely read articles for free immediately.
For the average scientist (including me) at a large institution, this has no effect. All of the hospital / university computers are whitelisted for almost all major journals by IP given the hospital / institution subscription. This will still occur, as I need journal access for articles when they come out, but this open archive access will benefit those not tied to major universities or private doctors out in the community.
Of note, it is an unspoken agreement in science that researchers at major institutions help others. Rarely we will receive an email from a doctor / researcher in Bumbletown, Argentina asking "Can you send me article from 1997 in X journal, they want $399 USD for an archive copy," I have a patient with this reported disease, etc.
Numerous points have been made about emergencies. As a doctor, I would add the following:
Radio waves do not know their discrete boundaries -- I don't have too much of a problem with jamming on private property in theory, provided the business informs the consumer very well that the premises is jammed. Therefore, doctors, etc. can avoid this area when on call or need to be reached, and people can 'vote with their wallets'; in truth I would not be a patron of such a place. However, in practice jamming signals can creep elsewhere, to the neighboring restaurant / apartment / out on the street. This clearly can be very dangerous.
Numerous people have commented that you should not expect to receive cell phone signals everywhere. This is true, and also why physicians still carry low-tech pagers, which have much more of a signal range. In clinical practice, all reliable systems for emergencies have redundancy. For instance, an interventional cardiologist in the middle of the night may be paged for a patient with a heart attack. If the operator doesn't hear back from the doctor in 5 minutes, he pages again and tries another form of communication (cell phone, land line..) If still no response, a backup doctor may be paged (extremely rare). Ideally, this redundancy works across different modalities (e.g. not all cellphone / 900 MHz etc.)
For some reason, probably historical, most doctors consider cellphones unreliable, and pagers completely reliable. For good systems, there must be redundancy as above in all situations. A half year ago, I got a nasty email from another doctor saying that I didn't return a page; I thought the person was crazy and they hadn't paged me, or paged the wrong person (still not sure what happened), but again, had they a second / backup method of reaching me, it would not have been a big deal. My role was not critical in that situation, so nothing happened (also why we didn't have critical redundancy), but if this had been due to *intentional* uninformed jamming, appropriate action would be taken...
Very interesting. I can say as a doctor I've never seen this used before though, but it reminded me of a few things:
During surgery the patient is unconscious, and thus feels no pain, but good surgeons recognize that local anesthesia is still necessary. It's a bit counterintuitive, and I remember being puzzled back in medical school that the surgeons would still numb the area before doing any work despite the patient being unresponsive regardless. The thought is that nerves are damaged and there are changes / responses to the painful stimulus that persist despite the individual being unconscious; in a way, you still have neuronal pain signals if you don't give local anesthesia. It also prevents the patient from waking up with pain in the operative site before you can give other types of painkillers.
Lidocaine (and capsaicin to some degree) would prevent the nerves from ever signaling -- they block the sodium channel that is necessary for nerves to fire. No firing -- no pain, *and* no no neuronal changes, and hopefully no long term pain. Lidocaine wears off after 2 hours or so, while it seems that capsaicin has much longer densitization effects.
Of note, capsaicin is also used in "pepper spray" self-defense products advertised to women in particular. I wonder if one could become numb to this after repeated sprayings. Hmmm, anybody on slashdot may be able to answer this from experience?:)
I'm a cardiologist - a couple of big points here...
Five second primer on cardiology: All muscles have a force-strength relationship that increases with distance stretched. That is, the farther you stretch a muscle, the more forcefully it will contract. This is called the Starling relationship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starling_law
Thus, when your heart is failing, what does it do? It allows itself to become more distended, increasing the stretch of each muscle cell, which increases the force of each beat. People that have heart failure often have big, dilated hearts in the body's attempt to generate every bit of force from it.
Unfortunately that dilation has negative effects. Specifically, after a while the heart can not handle the increased stretch and wall strain, and muscle cells will start to fail / die, and they become altered at the cellular level in ways that is detrimental over the long term.
Cardiac banding as described is a way to put a "girdle" on this failing heart, to *prevent further dilation* in hopes of minimizing negative consequences as above. It is used in *an already failing heart* in a kind of palliative sense. The summary is a bit misleading - it makes it sounds as though this patches it to prevent failure.
The idea is widely proposed and you can find it in many textbooks already; the patent by this Stanford group is for a specific implementation / material / technique. There are a few companies making banding / mesh devices, but none are in completely mainstream use yet. I work at one of the largest quaternary care centers, and have seen only two.
One of the concerns is that medium to long term outcomes are not really established, and this may give a restrictive effect -- that is, prevent adequate filling of the heart and impair blood circulation in that method. It is an active area of research, however, and IMHO is quite exciting.
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On Stardate 92714.3, the King of the United Saturnalia perished unexpectedly in a teleportation tragedy. He left in our accounts sum of NINETY-TWO TRILLION SEVEN HUNDRED EIGHT BILLION Quasi Universal Intergalactic Demoniations (QUID) which can not be accessed except by a native of the Milky Way. As of now this money sits unclaimed in our starbank.
I would like you to act as Earth fiduciary for this money. Please send your STARBANK number via encrypted link to me so that I may transfer this QUID to you. As agent for this transaction you will receive 10% of QUID in your account.
Please contact me at your most urgent communication, only over encrypted subspace link.
Yes, good point. I've used the MIT course syllabi for for teaching myself a few topics needed for programming, and they have, on occasion, been very helpful. Harvard streams all its lectures so we could watch them in our dorm rooms, but they were not released outside of the firewall.
Much as I would like to think that releasing video lectures will make people tune in on their Saturday night and become wonderfully educated citizens, I think this will be an evolutionary tool for a (relatively) niche market. Keep in mind that a vast repository of knowledge is already locally available for free for modest effort at your local library, in book and video forms, and look how masses of people are beating down doors to get in there.
Nevertheless, I do feel the possibilities are large, and a few immediate points come to mind:
- A complete (spoken) language course on Youtube / web for free would be very valuable. I could easily imagine sitting down for many hours watching a series of these and emerging with conversational language. This would be very useful prior to a planned trip so you could hit the ground running.
- Courses are very good at integrating study tools for a topic. If you try to learn calculus by picking up a book, you can probably do it. However more complex / scattered topics (Renaissance painting in Italy, Advanced concepts in cryptography, etc.) are very easily done using lectures plus book supplementation to guide one so you don't get lost / swamped in the topic.
Personally, I can't wait for video lectures to become freely available. I watched Andrew Morton at Google on Google Video as part of the speaker series, and found it quite interesting. However, I'm a geek, and you probably are too.
The RIAA frequently targeted students individually, and AFAIK continues threatening letters occasionally to individual students if they can figure out who you are. As you can see from the Crimson archives there was some pushback from the law school profs.
Back in the late 90's, your (fixed, non-DHCP) undergraduate IP at Harvard mapped to username.person.harvard.edu or something like that, making it trivially easy to see who was where, and you would 'magically' get spam for visiting websites, as your email was username@fas.harvard.edu. This was changed around '99 or so, now it is a roamXXX.student.harvard.edu I believe, and DHCP'd to a real IP address. This helps protect anonymity and individual student's activity, and Harvard does not give out the mapping to individual students.
Harvard internally sends curious emails reporting "excessive bandwidth" use to us, which also still continues AFAIK. Several of my friends received these, we think it was in the neighborhood of > 10 GB per day use. They basically said to quit it, or we might look further as to what you are doing, or bring you in front of a disciplinary committee. This was back in the days of i2hub (remember this?), and most of my friends just throttled their bandwidth with no further problems -- very scared of the hassle of defending yourself even if it is "legit" activity.
Re:Homeopathy and the power of the mind...
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> 1) Patients who are struggling with money spending more than they can afford on bogus treatments. Depriving them on money they could have spent on other things.
From my OP: >you wouldn't believe the people that adhere to homeopathic remedies and spend hundreds of dollars on these cure-alls, yet still "struggle" to afford the copay on the drugs that are actually keeping them alive.
Appreciate you bringing up the second and third dangerous anecdotes -- however, from my original post, I said it is difficult to tell somebody to do something that is NOT harmful, and clearly instilling polydipsia (excessive drinking) to the point of seizures from hyponatremia (low sodium) IS harmful. I stay involved with my patients that desire homeopathic remedies, and ask them what they have been doing in this regard. They *know* how I feel about the practice, (waste of time and money, largely,) but I don't beat them over the head with it. Clearly if they told me that they were spending large amounts of money or drinking themselves to death, I would step in with appropriate force.
Think of an analogy to religion. The vast majority of medical doctors tolerate if not support religion, with similar benefits that I eluded to earlier. Would you then disagree with this and come out with the counterarguments:
"I've seen somebody who prayed to their god instead of seeking a doctor!!! They died of infection instead of just coming in."
Clearly homeopaths can do harm. This is quite a different statement than what I was saying though.
There is a big difference between what seems scientifically implausible and what happens in a complex biological system. Many, many scientific theories that "seem right" are then proven wrong. A classic case study in medicine regarding this is the CAST study. Here, the drugs that suppress arrhythmias after somebody has a heart attack were found to kill them! Suppress life-threatening arrhythmias seems good, and logical. However, the end result was not what was expected at all. This was HUGE news and changed practice dramatically.
Now, what you are asking is slightly different -- we should discount "scientifically bogus" therapies. Well, it is difficult. Without going into too much detail, there are numerous therapies that sound like total bunk, and work. Take, for instance, counterpulsation therapy:
strapping on a G-suit and inflating it rapidly? Huh? Yet, there is a wealth of data supporting its effect.
Before anybody gets angry -- I don't believe in magic, and am not "tolerant" of magical thinking -- I firmly believe that each one of these therapies has a scientific, logical, demonstrable basis (counterpulsation likely releases vasoactive substances from vascular endothelium that have a positive effect, many yet to be discovered...) but it is not as easy as you would think to take a defiant stance.
Often, strong opinions are for weak minds.
Re:There should never be a settled issue in scienc
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Totally agreed. The trouble is, the placebo effect is real, and huge (somehow seems to settle in around ~30% regardless of what metric you use). People are all different in their diseases, and their response to medications. Thus, to test a drug you need a lot of patients with similar diseases, and give a fraction of them the drug, and a fraction of them placebo. You need to have a system of following up the results of this test without bias, and keeping track of potential confounding variables. Thus to convincingly scientifically demonstrate in medicine something (I did not say prove!), it takes a *lot* of time and money.
So, what do you do until then? You rely on small sample sizes or what seems "reasonable." If something is crack-pot, it probably doesn't work, and thus probably won't be proven nor disproven. I welcome you to entertain any theory, or anybody for that matter, but scientists focus on designing studies for reasonable hypotheses, and then form the test to demonstrate it.
What happens in real life, is somebody does something, it makes them feel better, and then they tell their friends about it. We have all seen the correlation versus causation debates here.
By the way, last time I ate carrots and posted on slashdot, I got +5 insightful. Excuse me, I'm going to get some carrots. Or maybe it was the postings on even days?:p
Homeopathy and the power of the mind...
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I'm a doctor -- I could write an entire book on the relation of "scientific" or "evidence-based" medicine in relation to homeopathy.
In general, homeopathy is essentially tolerated, and as the article humorously points out, it tends to not do much harm because things are dilute. From the Wikipedia article, which nicely summarizes it: > any positive effects of homeopathic treatment are simply a placebo effect.
That has pretty much been my experience -- and it is difficult for an individual (even a doctor) to tell somebody to NOT do something that is not harmful, and (very, very unlikely) may be beneficial. Physicians joke about "homeopathic" doses of drugs when we think a drug is significantly under-dosed (usually when beginning somebody on a new medicine to see how they react to it.)
It is really funny the ritual surrounding this -- you wouldn't believe the people that adhere to homeopathic remedies and spend hundreds of dollars on these cure-alls, yet still "struggle" to afford the copay on the drugs that are actually keeping them alive. However, something that reinforces positive thought (which indeed can have an effect on your health) is good, and the placebo effect is undeniable.
Despite their benign nature, the aggressive marketing of these substances to vulnerable groups (the sick) disagrees with me. I mean, look at this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=homeopathic+remedy&btnG=Google+Search and some of the wild claims they make for cure. I can't make these outlandish claims for most of the drugs I prescribe, so how can an honest doc compete?:)
> I'd say hospital equipment shouldn't malfunction when presented with interference on a widely used spectrum, but that's just me.
I'm a cardiologist - we get this question a lot, and I've been in many, um, discussions, about this issue.
In general, hospital equipment does not malfunction with any FCC approved wireless interference, especially from a consumer device. The trouble is, there are some anecdotes:
that demonstrate equipment malfunction with close proximity of cellphones / radios, etc. This 2005 report was widely publicized, (sorry, system demands that you purchase the article if you want to read it) but it was a cellphone left on top an IV infusion pump that apparently malfunctioned, and was reproducible (move the phone near the pump -> malfunction, move it away and returns to normal.)
I tell people that as long as they have a digital phone, they are ok to use it in the hospital. In truth, I think that if a nurse tells you to move to another area they are probably wanting you to stop yapping in common areas, which is a much bigger problem IMHO.
As with anything that deals with life or death, physicians and health care staff are quite risk averse. If there is a very, very small chance of interference, then we err on the side of caution. Your cellphone is designed to not interfere with things, but I'm sure we have all heard our computer speakers chatter *before* a call comes in, or seen your old CRT monitor jump due to an incoming call on a nearby phone. This is interference -- making all medical equipment so that they are totally oblivious to all outside fields would make them inconceivably heavy. Don't bother with the "faraday cage" argument -- most cases are metal, but as anybody with engineering experience would tell you it is imperfect (as I've stated before, you can use your cellphone in a metal plane, also a "faraday cage.")
So, no, hospital equipment is generally ok, but generally we tell people to not use cellphones in the intensive care unit or operating rooms, where things are most sensitive and potentially could have lethal consequences. We allow answering the phone and moving to an appropriate area, and allow cellphone use throughout the hospital otherwise (the doctors do this too). If it were a big risk, equipment would be malfunctioning left and right. However, it is prudent to minimize risks, especially for nonessential communication, hence the policies.
We (the US) have long had a ban on the export of 'strong' (>40 bit, now >64 bit key) technology to foreign governments / citizens. I've long wondered about this.
It seems to me that:
- All concerns regarding exporting of technology that is not guarded as a trade secret is ineffective. If China wants a technology that is freely available over here (USA), just have one of their numerous graduate students download the technology and send it over there. AFAIK, no American internet provider actively prohibits strong encryption connections to Chinese IPs (their "great firewall" may be different).
However, my second immediate thought is:
- Seagate likely has numerous trade secrets that are *not* public domain, and thus can now be exclusively owned and operated by the Chinese. Imagine if DES had a backdoor (or Seagate's equivalent), and my organization uses Seagate's out of box encryption (not likely;) -- now a foreign government controls this. Legitimately scary.
As for the 'manufacturing techniques' -- as long as there is an oligopoly of storage makers, I'm not concerned. We have bright minds here coming out of graduate school and going to work at Seagate as well as Western Digital, IBM, Intel, etc.
All the more reason to use published cryptographic standards, and not rely on any proprietary solutions -- they can never fall exclusively into the "wrong hands."
Agreed. Resistance to formalization also arises as it is not that glamorous -- look at the "physics-work" in CSI, or even a somewhat more realistic Mythbusters. Sitting down and calculating something is not as cool as making a big explosion or dancing around with a beautiful female in an all-glass cubicle (or perhaps I am just in the wrong job:). I think that demonstrating quantum mechanical tunneling via *math* is amazing, yet has very little intuitive grasp without the firm mathematical background.
Mythbusters is particularly bad about this, often things that they "test" you could just do on a piece of paper and see it is or is not going to work. Other times the design of the experiment is hugely flawed, often conceptually, and nobody talks about the elephant in the room (I could give you a bunch of examples -- one that comes to mind is the 'catching an arrow' episode which does not take into account anticipation of reaction or even moving the target backward). However I (as you can tell) still enjoy the show once in a while -- it is, to me, entertainment and kind of funny. I loved "Beyond 2000" as a kid (does anybody remember this?) and Mythbusters I think is by the same producers...
One of the things that would help all of what we outlined is a change in culture where discovery and true inquiry is advocated, asking well formulated / scientific questions is ok... To this degree, getting kids interested in answering questions empirically is a good thing. The Mythbusters occasionally visits true scientists at nearby NASA, etc., and attempts to learn very well and are respectful of what they learn, which is great IMHO. Kids / young adults will see this and want to be like the expert (hopefully!)
Every time I read an article in the MIT Technology Review, I have this horrible annoying dissatisfaction -- it is as though their articles are written by somebody that needs to fill 4000 words with something that he really doesn't understand. Sometimes their articles are filled with buzzwords (nanotechnology! bioinformatics! what about the philosophy of this new tech???), and just have ideas that are not developed or under referenced. Even the tone is way too immature to be taken seriously.
Quotes like this:
>Yes, but so what? Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and >reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don't like the idea that their brains are >protein machines.
Is the idea of a brain as a protein machine ever subsequently discussed? The whole article is so scattered I find it difficult to follow any sort of thesis or actual information. I'm not trying to be overly critical, but *every* article in that rag is like that -- read a few issues and you will see exactly what I mean. He references the New York Times for opinions on human psychology, for instance.
For a *much* better read about the development of Deep Blue (and quite entertaining despite the subject matter) pick up a copy of "Behind Deep Blue" by Feng-Hsiung Hsu.
This discusses in detail the choices the designers made regarding score weighting algorithms, and the various philosophies between a machine simply parsing all possible moves versus "thinking" what moves an opponent will make and the likely outcome of the current phase of the game. Excellent book for any nerd.
My previous hospital (a very large tertiary-care facility) made the switch from Microsoft Office to Staroffice in late 2005. I had a decidedly mixed experience.
At first, I thought it was the coolest thing around -- can use opendocument formats and pdf. Unfortunately, the administration set them up on Windows 2000 workstations instead of switching to Linux. After several weeks of use, for the majority of tasks there was *no* difference (typing memos / patient letters, simple spreadsheet stuff.)
However, for anything more advanced (pivot tables) I found myself relearning stuff (StarOffice calls it a DataPilot). This wasn't too bad.
My biggest gripe was the small incompatibilities between.ppt and ooimpress; when presenting to an audience of hundreds you can't all of a sudden have text flowing off the slide or the.bmp come up black. If I wanted to share something (most everybody else still runs Powerpoint) I had to doublecheck the whole thing prior to doing the slideshow. There were also many small incompatibilites with Excel importing.
Openoffice / Staroffice is also definitively slower than Microsoft Office on startup and for most tasks I used. After awhile most doc's / staff members griped, "I am just saving the hospital money that I would never have seen anyway, why do I have a headache using this generic stuff when we could just have the real thing?"
Don't get me wrong; I use Linux exclusively at home (except for one WinXP box for VPN to work through a Juniper client that is a pain under Linux). I use OpenOffice at home.
However, for the enterprise the average user doesn't care that the IT department will save a few hundred thousand dollars a year -- they just want what is better or faster, or lacking that, what they already know how to use. The average user also doesn't care about the open source philosophy that you and I do.
The hospital still uses Staroffice (at least when I left) and you could request a workstation to be equipped with Microsoft Office if needed. I wish that the hospital had gone with Linux workstations, with Citrix / virtualization of apps that are Windows only, which would have given the clear benefits of Linux (stability, no spyware installed, etc.) with Staroffice.
The short story is - Staroffice in itself was slower and (from the average user's perspective) not as good as Microsoft Office, the current standard, and was perceived as an inferior product. I *really* think that had this change been bundled with a switch to Linux on the desktop, which would have enhanced the user experience (no more popups / junkware slowing down the system) it would have been a great thing; but by itself it was not that useful. Again, just one user's experience, but this was a large corporation with thousands of workstations.
- Anybody else have similar experience with ditching Microsoft halfway in the corporate setting?
>I believe I'm not alone to still own both Transformers and Voltron toys from the 80's
You would only be alone if you still *played* with those toys from the 80's.:) My Voltron assembly sits somewhere in storage in a basement...
I think the franchise will do fine -- these movies have a dual appeal of nostalgia from us late 20's - 30 somethings, in addition to the timeless appeal to kids. How many young parents will take their kids to see it, or just see it with their old buddies for old times' sake?
Slashdot Mirror
I remember when Napster emerged everybody said how Shawn Fanning was a genius, and that this was a game-changing product, even though the application itself was not original (numerous p2p clients at the time, and this was bogged by use of a central indexing server, and music-specific.) The whole thing IIRC was in a visual-basic type language.
I am sad that his business ventures are going south, but it is a competitive industry, and frankly, not too hard to see the huge risk in this. They were not first on the line to the (legit) online music industry, nor did they get enough partnerships. Ability to code up a small VB / AJAX website does not make you a genius.
>I remember reading a rather stunning article a while back (would have had to have been 5+ years to be honest)
>when there was some random manufactured scandal about the Clintons taking money from a Chinese company, or
>somesuch. Well, a well known magazine at the time decided to run a cover with the Clintons and 1 or 2 other
>people all in "Chinese-face" -- their faces done up in a over the top parody of Asian facial structure stereotypes
>(exaggerated slanted eyes, sunken cheeks, etc)... And no one even took a second thought about how, this, you know, could be considered offensive.
Please -- if you are going to make outlandish claims like this at least research the facts a bit. "Random manufactured scandal?"
Anyhow, the article / cartoon in question was from "The National Review" in 1997, and they got a HUGE amount of backlash from this cartoon. I was in college at the time and there were NUMEROUS protests about this at the time. I would hope the shock was not limited to Harvard, and from talking to my friends at the time, it was not. here is a link. With a webserach, I'm sure you could find the original cartoon. As I recall, there were many protests at other colleges too, and it received quite a bit of coverage in the mainstream media.
Your post is simply too exaggerated and sensationalist... I agree there are pockets of America that remain very intolerant, but this is not speaking for all, or I would claim, not even the majority!
>I got a facebook account... there's not much there that helps me. I'm considering canceling that too.
Good luck! It is impossible to delete a facebook account.
From the link:
The website only gives users the option of "deactivating." However, once an account has been deactivated, all the personal information of users remain on Facebook's servers in case in the future they wish to reactivate. The website provides no means for users to permanently delete their account.
This, to me, is reason enough to not use the site.
I understand it well, been here forever! :)
With Kari Byron as the teaching fellow.
Seriously, you would spontaneously explode.
Exactly - every doctor learned this back in medical school; atropine is a temporary fix (anti-cholinergic) and pralidoxime allows regeneration of AChesterase to some degree so your body can naturally remove it. It's a little bit of a juggling act, and needs monitoring for levels. Most (civilian) MDs see something like this with pesticide spray (farmer inadvertently sticks his hand in liquid "nerve gas" organophosphate bug spray, etc.) not chemical attacks, but we all get training in this (standard emergency medicine situation).
The new drug is also an oxime -- you can look at the compound and it "looks" like two pralidoxime molecules joined together with a short linking segment (compare this to this. The goal is potency -- I've never personally injected pralidoxime, but I understand its effects on regeneration are limited.
Interestingly enough, in the otherwise healthy individual atropine would "just" cause your heartrate to skyrocket. If I were Nick Cage in that scene, I would go ahead and inject it into a vein, not the heart. Intra-cardiac injection can be used, but only as a last, last resort (e.g. the person is about to go unconscious, they are the only ones who can deliver the medication, no IV to use / no way to reliably otherwise introduce the drug, etc. etc.) It makes for dramatic movie moments, though!
Dear Sir / Madam:
...^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
I'm writing to inform you of a fire which has broken out on the premises of
FIRE! FIRE! HELP ME! 123 Callington Road. Looking forward to hearing from you. All the best, Maurice Moss
I'm a researching physician -- You did not take your own points to the logical conclusion:
.pdf attachment in reply.
A great deal (almost all) research has an NIH component of funding. Thus, if the bill goes through, *all journals will open their access* rather than have the scientists publish in lesser known journals, which will instantly become prestigious. The only articles that a 'closed' journal could publish would be those from industry or private/semiprivate funding sources (e.g. HHMI).
This is an indirect way of forcing open access to journals, which is a *great* thing.
Many journals have already opened up archive access. For instance, the New England Journal of Medicine http://nejm.org/ has its archive with free access, and also releases "important" or widely read articles for free immediately.
For the average scientist (including me) at a large institution, this has no effect. All of the hospital / university computers are whitelisted for almost all major journals by IP given the hospital / institution subscription. This will still occur, as I need journal access for articles when they come out, but this open archive access will benefit those not tied to major universities or private doctors out in the community.
Of note, it is an unspoken agreement in science that researchers at major institutions help others. Rarely we will receive an email from a doctor / researcher in Bumbletown, Argentina asking "Can you send me article from 1997 in X journal, they want $399 USD for an archive copy," I have a patient with this reported disease, etc.
They get a
Numerous points have been made about emergencies. As a doctor, I would add the following:
Radio waves do not know their discrete boundaries -- I don't have too much of a problem with jamming on private property in theory, provided the business informs the consumer very well that the premises is jammed. Therefore, doctors, etc. can avoid this area when on call or need to be reached, and people can 'vote with their wallets'; in truth I would not be a patron of such a place. However, in practice jamming signals can creep elsewhere, to the neighboring restaurant / apartment / out on the street. This clearly can be very dangerous.
Numerous people have commented that you should not expect to receive cell phone signals everywhere. This is true, and also why physicians still carry low-tech pagers, which have much more of a signal range. In clinical practice, all reliable systems for emergencies have redundancy. For instance, an interventional cardiologist in the middle of the night may be paged for a patient with a heart attack. If the operator doesn't hear back from the doctor in 5 minutes, he pages again and tries another form of communication (cell phone, land line..) If still no response, a backup doctor may be paged (extremely rare). Ideally, this redundancy works across different modalities (e.g. not all cellphone / 900 MHz etc.)
For some reason, probably historical, most doctors consider cellphones unreliable, and pagers completely reliable. For good systems, there must be redundancy as above in all situations. A half year ago, I got a nasty email from another doctor saying that I didn't return a page; I thought the person was crazy and they hadn't paged me, or paged the wrong person (still not sure what happened), but again, had they a second / backup method of reaching me, it would not have been a big deal. My role was not critical in that situation, so nothing happened (also why we didn't have critical redundancy), but if this had been due to *intentional* uninformed jamming, appropriate action would be taken...
Very interesting. I can say as a doctor I've never seen this used before though, but it reminded me of a few things:
:)
During surgery the patient is unconscious, and thus feels no pain, but good surgeons recognize that local anesthesia is still necessary. It's a bit counterintuitive, and I remember being puzzled back in medical school that the surgeons would still numb the area before doing any work despite the patient being unresponsive regardless. The thought is that nerves are damaged and there are changes / responses to the painful stimulus that persist despite the individual being unconscious; in a way, you still have neuronal pain signals if you don't give local anesthesia. It also prevents the patient from waking up with pain in the operative site before you can give other types of painkillers.
Lidocaine (and capsaicin to some degree) would prevent the nerves from ever signaling -- they block the sodium channel that is necessary for nerves to fire. No firing -- no pain, *and* no no neuronal changes, and hopefully no long term pain. Lidocaine wears off after 2 hours or so, while it seems that capsaicin has much longer densitization effects.
Of note, capsaicin is also used in "pepper spray" self-defense products advertised to women in particular. I wonder if one could become numb to this after repeated sprayings. Hmmm, anybody on slashdot may be able to answer this from experience?
I'm a cardiologist - a couple of big points here...
Five second primer on cardiology: All muscles have a force-strength relationship that increases with distance stretched. That is, the farther you stretch a muscle, the more forcefully it will contract. This is called the Starling relationship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starling_law
Thus, when your heart is failing, what does it do? It allows itself to become more distended, increasing the stretch of each muscle cell, which increases the force of each beat. People that have heart failure often have big, dilated hearts in the body's attempt to generate every bit of force from it.
Unfortunately that dilation has negative effects. Specifically, after a while the heart can not handle the increased stretch and wall strain, and muscle cells will start to fail / die, and they become altered at the cellular level in ways that is detrimental over the long term.
Cardiac banding as described is a way to put a "girdle" on this failing heart, to *prevent further dilation* in hopes of minimizing negative consequences as above. It is used in *an already failing heart* in a kind of palliative sense. The summary is a bit misleading - it makes it sounds as though this patches it to prevent failure.
The idea is widely proposed and you can find it in many textbooks already; the patent by this Stanford group is for a specific implementation / material / technique. There are a few companies making banding / mesh devices, but none are in completely mainstream use yet. I work at one of the largest quaternary care centers, and have seen only two.
One of the concerns is that medium to long term outcomes are not really established, and this may give a restrictive effect -- that is, prevent adequate filling of the heart and impair blood circulation in that method. It is an active area of research, however, and IMHO is quite exciting.
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Much as I would like to think that releasing video lectures will make people tune in on their Saturday night and become wonderfully educated citizens, I think this will be an evolutionary tool for a (relatively) niche market. Keep in mind that a vast repository of knowledge is already locally available for free for modest effort at your local library, in book and video forms, and look how masses of people are beating down doors to get in there.
Nevertheless, I do feel the possibilities are large, and a few immediate points come to mind:
- A complete (spoken) language course on Youtube / web for free would be very valuable. I could easily imagine sitting down for many hours watching a series of these and emerging with conversational language. This would be very useful prior to a planned trip so you could hit the ground running.
- Courses are very good at integrating study tools for a topic. If you try to learn calculus by picking up a book, you can probably do it. However more complex / scattered topics (Renaissance painting in Italy, Advanced concepts in cryptography, etc.) are very easily done using lectures plus book supplementation to guide one so you don't get lost / swamped in the topic.
Personally, I can't wait for video lectures to become freely available. I watched Andrew Morton at Google on Google Video as part of the speaker series, and found it quite interesting. However, I'm a geek, and you probably are too.
I went to Harvard for college...
http://www.thecrimson.com/archives.aspx?SearchTerms=RIAA&SortField=0&PageSize=10&News=1&Opinion=2&Sports=3&Magazine=5&Arts=4
I hope the Crimson's servers stand up.
The RIAA frequently targeted students individually, and AFAIK continues threatening letters occasionally to individual students if they can figure out who you are. As you can see from the Crimson archives there was some pushback from the law school profs.
Back in the late 90's, your (fixed, non-DHCP) undergraduate IP at Harvard mapped to username.person.harvard.edu or something like that, making it trivially easy to see who was where, and you would 'magically' get spam for visiting websites, as your email was username@fas.harvard.edu. This was changed around '99 or so, now it is a roamXXX.student.harvard.edu I believe, and DHCP'd to a real IP address. This helps protect anonymity and individual student's activity, and Harvard does not give out the mapping to individual students.
Harvard internally sends curious emails reporting "excessive bandwidth" use to us, which also still continues AFAIK. Several of my friends received these, we think it was in the neighborhood of > 10 GB per day use. They basically said to quit it, or we might look further as to what you are doing, or bring you in front of a disciplinary committee. This was back in the days of i2hub (remember this?), and most of my friends just throttled their bandwidth with no further problems -- very scared of the hassle of defending yourself even if it is "legit" activity.
You set up a clear straw man argument. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man We don't disagree at all.
> 1) Patients who are struggling with money spending more than they can afford on bogus treatments. Depriving them on money they could have spent on other things.
From my OP:
>you wouldn't believe the people that adhere to homeopathic remedies and spend hundreds of dollars on these cure-alls, yet still "struggle" to afford the copay on the drugs that are actually keeping them alive.
Appreciate you bringing up the second and third dangerous anecdotes -- however, from my original post, I said it is difficult to tell somebody to do something that is NOT harmful, and clearly instilling polydipsia (excessive drinking) to the point of seizures from hyponatremia (low sodium) IS harmful. I stay involved with my patients that desire homeopathic remedies, and ask them what they have been doing in this regard. They *know* how I feel about the practice, (waste of time and money, largely,) but I don't beat them over the head with it. Clearly if they told me that they were spending large amounts of money or drinking themselves to death, I would step in with appropriate force.
Think of an analogy to religion. The vast majority of medical doctors tolerate if not support religion, with similar benefits that I eluded to earlier. Would you then disagree with this and come out with the counterarguments:
"I've seen somebody who prayed to their god instead of seeking a doctor!!! They died of infection instead of just coming in."
Clearly homeopaths can do harm. This is quite a different statement than what I was saying though.
Wisdom is what happened.
There is a big difference between what seems scientifically implausible and what happens in a complex biological system. Many, many scientific theories that "seem right" are then proven wrong. A classic case study in medicine regarding this is the CAST study. Here, the drugs that suppress arrhythmias after somebody has a heart attack were found to kill them! Suppress life-threatening arrhythmias seems good, and logical. However, the end result was not what was expected at all. This was HUGE news and changed practice dramatically.
http://general-medicine.jwatch.org/cgi/content/full/1991/322/1
Now, what you are asking is slightly different -- we should discount "scientifically bogus" therapies. Well, it is difficult. Without going into too much detail, there are numerous therapies that sound like total bunk, and work. Take, for instance, counterpulsation therapy:
http://www.clevelandclinic.org/heartcenter/pub/guide/disease/cad/eecp.htm
strapping on a G-suit and inflating it rapidly? Huh? Yet, there is a wealth of data supporting its effect.
Before anybody gets angry -- I don't believe in magic, and am not "tolerant" of magical thinking -- I firmly believe that each one of these therapies has a scientific, logical, demonstrable basis (counterpulsation likely releases vasoactive substances from vascular endothelium that have a positive effect, many yet to be discovered...) but it is not as easy as you would think to take a defiant stance.
Often, strong opinions are for weak minds.
Totally agreed. The trouble is, the placebo effect is real, and huge (somehow seems to settle in around ~30% regardless of what metric you use). People are all different in their diseases, and their response to medications. Thus, to test a drug you need a lot of patients with similar diseases, and give a fraction of them the drug, and a fraction of them placebo. You need to have a system of following up the results of this test without bias, and keeping track of potential confounding variables. Thus to convincingly scientifically demonstrate in medicine something (I did not say prove!), it takes a *lot* of time and money.
:p
So, what do you do until then? You rely on small sample sizes or what seems "reasonable." If something is crack-pot, it probably doesn't work, and thus probably won't be proven nor disproven. I welcome you to entertain any theory, or anybody for that matter, but scientists focus on designing studies for reasonable hypotheses, and then form the test to demonstrate it.
What happens in real life, is somebody does something, it makes them feel better, and then they tell their friends about it. We have all seen the correlation versus causation debates here.
By the way, last time I ate carrots and posted on slashdot, I got +5 insightful. Excuse me, I'm going to get some carrots. Or maybe it was the postings on even days?
I'm a doctor -- I could write an entire book on the relation of "scientific" or "evidence-based" medicine in relation to homeopathy.
:)
In general, homeopathy is essentially tolerated, and as the article humorously points out, it tends to not do much harm because things are dilute. From the Wikipedia article, which nicely summarizes it:
> any positive effects of homeopathic treatment are simply a placebo effect.
That has pretty much been my experience -- and it is difficult for an individual (even a doctor) to tell somebody to NOT do something that is not harmful, and (very, very unlikely) may be beneficial. Physicians joke about "homeopathic" doses of drugs when we think a drug is significantly under-dosed (usually when beginning somebody on a new medicine to see how they react to it.)
It is really funny the ritual surrounding this -- you wouldn't believe the people that adhere to homeopathic remedies and spend hundreds of dollars on these cure-alls, yet still "struggle" to afford the copay on the drugs that are actually keeping them alive. However, something that reinforces positive thought (which indeed can have an effect on your health) is good, and the placebo effect is undeniable.
Despite their benign nature, the aggressive marketing of these substances to vulnerable groups (the sick) disagrees with me. I mean, look at this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=homeopathic+remedy&btnG=Google+Search and some of the wild claims they make for cure. I can't make these outlandish claims for most of the drugs I prescribe, so how can an honest doc compete?
> I'd say hospital equipment shouldn't malfunction when presented with interference on a widely used spectrum, but that's just me.
I'm a cardiologist - we get this question a lot, and I've been in many, um, discussions, about this issue.
In general, hospital equipment does not malfunction with any FCC approved wireless interference, especially from a consumer device. The trouble is, there are some anecdotes:
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0196064405007110
that demonstrate equipment malfunction with close proximity of cellphones / radios, etc. This 2005 report was widely publicized, (sorry, system demands that you purchase the article if you want to read it) but it was a cellphone left on top an IV infusion pump that apparently malfunctioned, and was reproducible (move the phone near the pump -> malfunction, move it away and returns to normal.)
I tell people that as long as they have a digital phone, they are ok to use it in the hospital. In truth, I think that if a nurse tells you to move to another area they are probably wanting you to stop yapping in common areas, which is a much bigger problem IMHO.
As with anything that deals with life or death, physicians and health care staff are quite risk averse. If there is a very, very small chance of interference, then we err on the side of caution. Your cellphone is designed to not interfere with things, but I'm sure we have all heard our computer speakers chatter *before* a call comes in, or seen your old CRT monitor jump due to an incoming call on a nearby phone. This is interference -- making all medical equipment so that they are totally oblivious to all outside fields would make them inconceivably heavy. Don't bother with the "faraday cage" argument -- most cases are metal, but as anybody with engineering experience would tell you it is imperfect (as I've stated before, you can use your cellphone in a metal plane, also a "faraday cage.")
So, no, hospital equipment is generally ok, but generally we tell people to not use cellphones in the intensive care unit or operating rooms, where things are most sensitive and potentially could have lethal consequences. We allow answering the phone and moving to an appropriate area, and allow cellphone use throughout the hospital otherwise (the doctors do this too). If it were a big risk, equipment would be malfunctioning left and right. However, it is prudent to minimize risks, especially for nonessential communication, hence the policies.
We (the US) have long had a ban on the export of 'strong' (>40 bit, now >64 bit key) technology to foreign governments / citizens. I've long wondered about this.
;) -- now a foreign government controls this. Legitimately scary.
It seems to me that:
- All concerns regarding exporting of technology that is not guarded as a trade secret is ineffective. If China wants a technology that is freely available over here (USA), just have one of their numerous graduate students download the technology and send it over there. AFAIK, no American internet provider actively prohibits strong encryption connections to Chinese IPs (their "great firewall" may be different).
However, my second immediate thought is:
- Seagate likely has numerous trade secrets that are *not* public domain, and thus can now be exclusively owned and operated by the Chinese. Imagine if DES had a backdoor (or Seagate's equivalent), and my organization uses Seagate's out of box encryption (not likely
As for the 'manufacturing techniques' -- as long as there is an oligopoly of storage makers, I'm not concerned. We have bright minds here coming out of graduate school and going to work at Seagate as well as Western Digital, IBM, Intel, etc.
All the more reason to use published cryptographic standards, and not rely on any proprietary solutions -- they can never fall exclusively into the "wrong hands."
Agreed. Resistance to formalization also arises as it is not that glamorous -- look at the "physics-work" in CSI, or even a somewhat more realistic Mythbusters. Sitting down and calculating something is not as cool as making a big explosion or dancing around with a beautiful female in an all-glass cubicle (or perhaps I am just in the wrong job :). I think that demonstrating quantum mechanical tunneling via *math* is amazing, yet has very little intuitive grasp without the firm mathematical background.
Mythbusters is particularly bad about this, often things that they "test" you could just do on a piece of paper and see it is or is not going to work. Other times the design of the experiment is hugely flawed, often conceptually, and nobody talks about the elephant in the room (I could give you a bunch of examples -- one that comes to mind is the 'catching an arrow' episode which does not take into account anticipation of reaction or even moving the target backward). However I (as you can tell) still enjoy the show once in a while -- it is, to me, entertainment and kind of funny. I loved "Beyond 2000" as a kid (does anybody remember this?) and Mythbusters I think is by the same producers...
One of the things that would help all of what we outlined is a change in culture where discovery and true inquiry is advocated, asking well formulated / scientific questions is ok... To this degree, getting kids interested in answering questions empirically is a good thing. The Mythbusters occasionally visits true scientists at nearby NASA, etc., and attempts to learn very well and are respectful of what they learn, which is great IMHO. Kids / young adults will see this and want to be like the expert (hopefully!)
Every time I read an article in the MIT Technology Review, I have this horrible annoying dissatisfaction -- it is as though their articles are written by somebody that needs to fill 4000 words with something that he really doesn't understand. Sometimes their articles are filled with buzzwords (nanotechnology! bioinformatics! what about the philosophy of this new tech???), and just have ideas that are not developed or under referenced. Even the tone is way too immature to be taken seriously.
:p
Quotes like this:
>Yes, but so what? Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and
>reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don't like the idea that their brains are
>protein machines.
Is the idea of a brain as a protein machine ever subsequently discussed? The whole article is so scattered I find it difficult to follow any sort of thesis or actual information. I'm not trying to be overly critical, but *every* article in that rag is like that -- read a few issues and you will see exactly what I mean. He references the New York Times for opinions on human psychology, for instance.
For a *much* better read about the development of Deep Blue (and quite entertaining despite the subject matter) pick up a copy of "Behind Deep Blue" by Feng-Hsiung Hsu.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7342.html
This discusses in detail the choices the designers made regarding score weighting algorithms, and the various philosophies between a machine simply parsing all possible moves versus "thinking" what moves an opponent will make and the likely outcome of the current phase of the game. Excellent book for any nerd.
Yes, I went to MIT...
My previous hospital (a very large tertiary-care facility) made the switch from Microsoft Office to Staroffice in late 2005. I had a decidedly mixed experience.
.ppt and ooimpress; when presenting to an audience of hundreds you can't all of a sudden have text flowing off the slide or the .bmp come up black. If I wanted to share something (most everybody else still runs Powerpoint) I had to doublecheck the whole thing prior to doing the slideshow. There were also many small incompatibilites with Excel importing.
At first, I thought it was the coolest thing around -- can use opendocument formats and pdf. Unfortunately, the administration set them up on Windows 2000 workstations instead of switching to Linux. After several weeks of use, for the majority of tasks there was *no* difference (typing memos / patient letters, simple spreadsheet stuff.)
However, for anything more advanced (pivot tables) I found myself relearning stuff (StarOffice calls it a DataPilot). This wasn't too bad.
My biggest gripe was the small incompatibilities between
Openoffice / Staroffice is also definitively slower than Microsoft Office on startup and for most tasks I used. After awhile most doc's / staff members griped, "I am just saving the hospital money that I would never have seen anyway, why do I have a headache using this generic stuff when we could just have the real thing?"
Don't get me wrong; I use Linux exclusively at home (except for one WinXP box for VPN to work through a Juniper client that is a pain under Linux). I use OpenOffice at home.
However, for the enterprise the average user doesn't care that the IT department will save a few hundred thousand dollars a year -- they just want what is better or faster, or lacking that, what they already know how to use. The average user also doesn't care about the open source philosophy that you and I do.
The hospital still uses Staroffice (at least when I left) and you could request a workstation to be equipped with Microsoft Office if needed. I wish that the hospital had gone with Linux workstations, with Citrix / virtualization of apps that are Windows only, which would have given the clear benefits of Linux (stability, no spyware installed, etc.) with Staroffice.
The short story is - Staroffice in itself was slower and (from the average user's perspective) not as good as Microsoft Office, the current standard, and was perceived as an inferior product. I *really* think that had this change been bundled with a switch to Linux on the desktop, which would have enhanced the user experience (no more popups / junkware slowing down the system) it would have been a great thing; but by itself it was not that useful. Again, just one user's experience, but this was a large corporation with thousands of workstations.
- Anybody else have similar experience with ditching Microsoft halfway in the corporate setting?
>I believe I'm not alone to still own both Transformers and Voltron toys from the 80's
:) My Voltron assembly sits somewhere in storage in a basement...
You would only be alone if you still *played* with those toys from the 80's.
I think the franchise will do fine -- these movies have a dual appeal of nostalgia from us late 20's - 30 somethings, in addition to the timeless appeal to kids. How many young parents will take their kids to see it, or just see it with their old buddies for old times' sake?
As pointed out here, Gobots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobots were actually the original adaptation of the Japanese toy.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock. -Winston Churchill
You're erroneously combining British wit with Teddy Roosevelt's popular quote, "Speak softly and carry a big stick."
I suppose it is better than the other way, "Speak softly and carry a big doggie?"